The use of Subject Matter Experts in Validating an Oral Health-Related Quality of Life measure in Korean.
OBJECTIVE
This paper aimed to employ subject matter experts (SMEs) to assess the extent to which the Korean version of the short-form of the OHIP (OHIP-14 K) is culturally valid and equivalent in Korean.


METHODS
We approached 17 bilingual Korean SMEs from which 10 independently rated the clarity, relevance, and cultural equivalence of the OHIP-14 K. SME's varied between 10 and 41 years of clinical experience and were mostly males (# 7). We used Item-level Content Validity Index (I-CVI) to gauge the proportion of SMEs who considered the content of OHIP items (e.g., instruction, response format, etc.) to be culturally valid. We also performed additional analysis to determine the level of agreement between the SMEs.


RESULTS
The experts rated most of the items to be clear (S-CVI = 0.93) while having difficulties in assigning relevance of the questions to the expected domains (S-CVI = 0.42). Moreover, considerable disagreement existed among the experts in regard to the relevance (Kfree = 0.19 to 1.00) and the cultural equivalence indexes (ADM = 0.36 to 0.96). The content of the OHIP-14 K for the most part clearly reproduced the language of the original OHIP-14. However, experts disagreed on the relevance and conceptual equivalence of the OHIP-14 K for a Korean population.


CONCLUSIONS
Patient-oriented outcome measures such as the OHIP can be used across cultures once there are indeed assessing the same domains and constructs of interest. The CVI technique seems to be an alternative tool for evaluating content validity and equivalency of an OHQoL measure. A more refined, culturally relevant version of OHIP-14 K was proposed although there is no available data yet to support a better score validity, reliability and responsiveness of this proposed version.
Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry Western University, Ontario, Canada. Jaesung.Seo@wu.ca.
Jaesung
J
Seo
Department of Oral Health, Sciences. Division of Prosthodontics and Dental Geriatrics, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. macentee@ubc.ca.
Michael
M
MacEntee
Department of Oral Health Sciences. Division of Preventive & Community Dentistry, and Prosthodontics and Dental Geriatrics, University of British Columbia, JBM 122/2199 Wesbrook Mall, Vancouver, BC, V6T 1Z3, Canada. Brondani@dentistry.ubc.ca.
Mario
M
Brondani
D001294:Attitude to Health / Q000208:ethnology*; D002170:Canada / Q000453:epidemiology; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008297:Male; D009909:Oral Health / Q000208:ethnology*; D011788:Quality of Life / Q000523:psychology*; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D056910:Republic of Korea / Q000208:ethnology; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires / Q000592:standards*