Adaptação transcultural do Parental Diary of Infants Crying e do Infant Crying Questionnaire – 6 months para a língua portuguesa no Brasil

Abstract

Crying is a form of communication between children and their parents. However a non-specific way, it can be provoked by different stimuli, such as hunger, discomfort, pain, or simply the need to be held for comfort and safety. Whether for pain or another reason, it is notable that children’s crying is a potential cause of parents’ anxiety, worry, and anguish. Thus, it is essential to provide one more alternatives for understanding crying that contribute to the management of the situation. There are several measures to assess children’s crying. The main ones are presented in questionnaires or registered diaries. However, these measures are not available in the Brazilian version. Based on these assumptions, this work aims to cross culturally adapt the Parental Diary of Infants Crying and the Infant Crying Questionnaire – 6 months to the Portuguese language in Brazil. This process is the first step toward providing and assessment these instruments to be used by researchers and health professionals to study behavior, interventions and treatments related to babies and their parents in Brazil. Therefore, a methodological study was carried out following the steps of translation, synthesis of translations, back-translations, meeting of the expert committee and pre-test in a populations sample characterized by parents of an only child with up to 6 months of life. The cross-cultural adaptation process was presented in a descriptively and analytically, following patterns of methodological studies. The 6 participants in the pre-test evaluated the clarity, relevance, and adequacy of the answers to the items. The analysis of the responses of the pre-test group indicated that both instruments are easy to understand. However, a subsequent study investigating their psychometric properties is recommended to ensure that culturally adapted instruments generate valid and reliable data. The cross-cultural adaptation of the Parental Diary of Infants Crying and the Infant Crying Questionnaire – 6 months, in its components of linguistic, semantic, conceptual and cultural equivalence to Brazilian Portuguese for the population of parents with chidren up to 6 months old, was entirely performed. Despite this achievement, it is noteworthy that the using the Brazilian version of the Parental Diary of Infants Crying and the Infant Crying Questionnaire – 6 months in research and clinical routine is only recommended after a psychometric study with these instruments.