Translation, cultural adjustment, and validation of a measure of adaptive behavior.
Follow a formal cross-cultural adaptation process—translation, back-translation, piloting, and psychometric checks—before using Western assessments in non-Western contexts.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team took a Western adaptive-behavior scale and made it work in Indonesia. They translated it, back-translated it, tested it with local families, and checked if the questions still made sense.
No scores or client outcomes are reported. The paper is a recipe for cultural adaptation, not a test of therapy.
What they found
The process itself is the product. Each step caught wording that could confuse Indonesian parents. The final version kept the original meaning while sounding natural in Bahasa Indonesia.
How this fits with other research
Santos et al. (2014) did the same dance in Portugal and showed the Portuguese scale is reliable and valid. Together the two papers say: follow the full process and you get a tool you can trust.
Badia et al. (2012) and Ruta et al. (2012) used the same translate-back-translate-pilot steps for a leisure inventory and the Italian Autism-Spectrum Quotient. The method travels well across constructs and cultures.
Baranek et al. (2005) used the original AAMD scale to spot psychiatric sub-groups in clients with ID. Their work reminds us: once the translation is solid, the scale can guide clinical decisions, not just research.
Why it matters
If you serve families who speak another language, don’t just hand them the English form. Run a quick back-translation with a bilingual aide, pilot the items with two families, and drop questions that confuse. This thirty-minute step saves months of bad data and wrong goals.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
This paper investigates whether a measure of adaptive behavior, which has been developed and validated in western countries, could be successfully adapted to a nonwestern country, Indonesia. The purposes of the study were to (a) delineate procedures for cross-cultural adaptation and validation of adaptive behavior measurement, (b) create an operational version of an instrument in an Indonesian setting, and (c) investigate the validity of the resultant instrument by studying whether it had the same psychometric properties as its United States counterpart. The results are discussed in terms of the usefulness of the methodology employed for ascertaining the worth of any operationalizations of constructs and themes borrowed from other cultures that will form the basis for educational program development and individual pupil assessment.
Research in developmental disabilities, 1992 · doi:10.1016/0891-4222(92)90004-p