With a little help from my friends? Acculturation and mental health in Arabic-speaking refugee youth living with their families

Clinicians and researchers without a suitable health-related quality of life (HRQOL) measure in their own language have two choices: (1) to develop a new measure, or (2) to modify a measure previously validated in another language, known as a cross-cultural adaptation process. We propose a set of standardized guidelines for this process based on previous research in psychology and sociology and on published methodological frameworks. These guidelines include recommendations for obtaining semantic, idiomatic, experiential and conceptual equivalence in translation by using back-translation techniques and committee review, pre-testing techniques and re-examining the weight of scores. We applied these guidelines to 17 cross-cultural adaptation of HRQOL measures identified through a comprehensive literature review. The reporting standards varied across studies but agreement between raters in their ratings of the studies was substantial to almost perfect (weighted kappa = 0.66-0.93) suggesting that the guidelines are easy to apply. Further research is necessary in order to delineate essential versus optional steps in the adaptation process. Show more

A review of 2,647 studies of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) yielded 476 potential candidates for a meta-analysis of predictors of PTSD or of its symptoms. From these, 68 studies met criteria for inclusion in a meta-analysis of 7 predictors: (a) prior trauma, (b) prior psychological adjustment, (c) family history of psychopathology, (d) perceived life threat during the trauma, (e) posttrauma social support, (f) peritraumatic emotional responses, and (g) peritraumatic dissociation. All yielded significant effect sizes, with family history, prior trauma, and prior adjustment the smallest (weighted r = .17) and peritraumatic dissociation the largest (weighted r = .35). The results suggest that peritraumatic psychological processes, not prior characteristics, are the strongest predictors of PTSD. Show more