The Psychosocial Impact of Assistive Devices Scale (PIADS): Translation and preliminary psychometric evaluation of a Canadian–French version

Abstract

This article reports on the Canadian–French translation of the Psychosocial Impact of Assistive Devices Scale (PIADS), a 26-item questionnaire that measures the quality of life (QoL) impacts of using assistive technologies from the person with disability's point of view. Following standard procedures, the study included forward and backward translations, committee reviewing, pre-testing with bilingual lay people, and psychometric evaluation of the translated questionnaire with subjects with mobility impairment (n = 83) and visual impairment (n = 37). The use of translators translating in their mother tongue and the participation of one author of the questionnaire contributed to the quality of the translation. We found that words that had equivalence in English and French did not necessarily cover the same areas of meaning. The subscales (n = 3) and total scale of the French PIADS achieved good test–retest stability (ICC of 0.77–0.90) and internal consistency (0.75–0.94). Concurrent validity with the source PIADS also produced acceptable coefficients (0.77–0.83). At the item level, non-significant t test (p > 0.10) results supported the premise that the scores were not different across languages, except for two items. The results are robust enough to recommend the use of the Canadian–French questionnaire for the investigation of the QoL impacts of assistive technologies for persons with disability.