Abstract

Editorial
We are writing with regards to the paper entitled “The quality of life in late-stage dementia (QUALID) scale” by Myron Weiner published in your prestigious journal in November 1999. We are conducting a translation and psychometric research in Iran. Since we wanted to adopt the questionnaire developed by Dr. Weiner, we contacted him and explained the purpose of our study. He was so kind to provide us with the questionnaire which was then, according to WHO guidelines translated into Persian and then back-translated. At the pilot testing, the questionnaire was administered to 10 individuals from the target population (here, caregivers from family members) who were not among the research population. The purpose was to find out if the language of the questionnaire was at the level of their understanding and to better identify potential errors, thus the participants were asked to feel free to express their opinions about the ‘ambiguity’, and ‘difficulty’ of the items. The individuals encountered some problems in understanding the meanings of some items. The items were reviewed and checked again and the issue was raised in a meeting with our colleagues at English department and native-like speakers, and they unanimously confirmed the ambiguity of the phrases. Therefore, the problems encountered by caregivers were not in fact due to the translation of the items but due to the vague expressions in the original questionnaire. Moreover, some options consist of two or three different adverbs of frequency and of course with different meanings at the same time.