The Vietnamese Version of the Brief Illness Perception Questionnaire and the Beliefs about Medicines Questionnaire: Translation and Cross-cultural Adaptation.

Objective: To translate and cross-culturally adapt the Brief Illness Perception Questionnaire (BIPQ) and the Beliefs about Medicines Questionnaire (BMQ) into Vietnamese.

Methods: We followed the guideline by Beaton et al. (2000 & 2007). Stage I: two translators (informed and uninformed) translated the questionnaires. Stage II: the translations were synthesised. Stage III: back translation was performed by two translators fluent in both Vietnamese and English but naïve to the outcome measurement. Stage IV: seven experts reached consensus on the pre-final Vietnamese version (BIPQ-V and BMQ-V). Stage V: field test of the questionnaires on 16 twelve-year-old students and 31 Vietnamese patients. In addition, we determined the internal consistency and test-retest reliability of the questionnaires in 34 Vietnamese patients with acute coronary syndrome.

Results: All experts agreed that there was semantic, idiomatic, experiential and conceptual equivalence between the original and pre-final Vietnamese versions of the BIPQ and BMQ. Cronbach's alpha coefficients of the internal consistency were acceptable for the BMQ-V Specific-Necessity (0.64), BMQ-V Specific-Concerns (0.62) and BMQ-V General-Harm (0.60), with the exception of BMQ-V General-Overuse (0.27). Intra-class correlation coefficients of the test-retest reliability were acceptable for the subscales of BMQ-V (range: 0.77-0.86), and BIPQ-V items (range: 0.62-0.85) with the exception of BIPQ-V 1 (0.44, 95% CI -014 to 0.72) and BIPQ-V 4 (0.57, 95% CI 0.22-0.81).

Conclusions: The Vietnamese version of BIPQ and BMQ are reliable tools to assess illness perceptions and beliefs about medicines of patients with acute coronary syndrome. Psychometric properties of these questionnaires should be tested in different patient populations.