Translation of the Cognitive Failures Questionnaire into Urdu and its Reliability in Pakistani Women with Polycystic Ovary Syndrome

Abstract

Small lapses of attention, memory and action are among the difficulties patients report most often, yet no Urdu instrument has been available for recording them. This paper reports an Urdu rendering of the Cognitive Failures Questionnaire (CFQ), published by Broadbent, Cooper, FitzGerald and Parkes in 1982, together with an examination of how the translated items behave. Written consent to translate and to use the instrument was given by its developer. Three bilingual translators wrote independent Urdu versions of the 25 items, a review panel worked through the three drafts item by item and settled on a single reconciled text, an English specialist who had never seen the source turned that text back into English, and the returned English was read against the original for agreement of sense rather than of wording. The questionnaire was then pre-tested and administered to 60 women carrying a gynaecological diagnosis of polycystic ovary syndrome at private and government facilities in Punjab, aged between 15 and 45 years (M = 23.97, SD = 3.74). The 25 Urdu items returned an alpha coefficient of .861, a mean inter-item correlation of .202 and a median corrected item-total correlation of .413, and 22 of them cleared the criterion of .30. The three that failed describe letter writing and road navigation, neither of which is a common activity for respondents of this kind; the weakest of the three carried no information whatever about the construct (r = .021) and held down the coefficient of its own subscale by a tenth. Totals rose with mental fatigue and fell with psychological well-being. The Urdu CFQ is recommended for use as a total score.