The long-term objective of this project is to improve the rehabilitation outcomes of persons with physical disabilities whose primary language is Spanish and who live in the United States. The immediate objectives of this project are to: (a) back-translate and modify and (b) evaluate the psychometric properties of several standardized outcome measurement tools that have been professionally translated from English into Spanish. These instruments measure such things as heritage, disability, handicap, health status, and subjective well-being. The instruments will be tested in a sample of Spanish- speaking persons who have sustained either a spinal cord injury (SCI; n = 100) or a traumatic brain injury (TBI; n = 100). The testing will include evaluating the equivalence of the Spanish- and English-language versions of the measures. Specifically, descriptive statistics for each instrument will be compared with those from English-speaking persons (SCI, n = 150 (from existing database]; TBI, n = 100). Comparability of reliability will be assessed from estimates of internal consistency, item-total correlations, interscale correlations, and test-retest correlations. Construct validity will be assessed with exploratory factor analysis and through estimates of convergent and discriminant validity. A further objective is that those instruments that prove to be psychometrically sound in Spanish will be shared with other researchers and clinicians in physical medicine and rehabilitation (and other fields) for use in other studies and clinically, as appropriate. Dissemination will be accomplished through published scientific articles and at national professional conferences. Finally, assessing the psychometric properties of these instruments will allow future investigation of the impact of various rehabilitation interventions on the lives of persons with disabilities whose primary language is Spanish.
