The cross-cultural adaptation of the DASH questionnaire in Canadian French

The purpose of this study was to perform a cross-cultural adaptation of the original version of the Disability of Arm, Shoulder and Hand (DASH) questionnaire to Canadian French. The cross-cultural adaptation followed five steps: forward translations into Canadian French, a synthesis of the translations, back translations into English, revision by a committee of experts, and test of the prefinal version. The content validity and the internal consistency of the Canadian French version of the questionnaire were assessed by experts involved in the study and by subjects who participated in the pilot study. Results indicate that the scores were adequately distributed without floor or ceiling effect. Item completion was excellent and item responses had a good distribution. Internal consistency of the total score was high (Cronbach alpha = 0.94) and item-total correlations were substantial for most items (0.43-0.88). These results are similar to previous studies on the DASH questionnaire supporting linguistic and conceptual equivalence of the Canadian French version.