Translation, cross-cultural adaptation, and validation of a semi-structured interview Physical Activity Recall Assessment for People with Spinal Cord Injury in persons with paraplegia

Objective: The purpose of this study was to translate, adapt and validate administration and scoring manual of the semi-structured interview Physical Activity Recall Assessment for People with Spinal Cord Injury (PARA-SCI), focused on the subjective perception of the amount of physical activity of persons with paraplegia.

Methods: To determine the criterion validity of the research tool, we compared data from 53 people with paraplegia collected through PARA-SCI interviews and data from the ActiGraph GT3X+ accelerometer, which respondents wore on their non-dominant wrist. We evaluated the test-retest reliability among 39 subjects with paraplegia, which consists in administering the questionnaire on two occasions separated by a time interval one week.

Results: : In the validity study, the correlation between data for overall physical activity over three days form accelerometers and PARA-SCI interviews showed the strong level of correlation strength (r = .58, p < .001). The intraclass correlation between data for overall physical activity over three days from two PARA-SCI interviews showed a moderate level of test-retest reliability (r = .70, p < .001). The intraclass correlations ranged from .38 to .80 for the various PARA-SCI activity categories and intensities.

Conclusions: A Czech version of the semi-structured interview PARA-SCI was standardised and can be used by physiotherapists, nutrition therapists and sports educators from the field of adapted physical activities in the Czech Republic.