Background: The Diabetes Distress Scale (DDS) is a valid instrument to measure diabetes distress included in American Diabetes Association and Canadian Diabetes Association guidelines but not available in Vietnamese. This study translated and culturally adapted the DDS to assess diabetes distress of Vietnamese type 2 diabetics and evaluated its internal consistency, face and content validity.

Methods: The translation process followed standard guidelines for adaptation of an instrument: forward translation, back translation, synthesis, evaluation by an expert panel and pretest. The expert panel included three English specialists as linguistic experts and six content experts in multidisciplinary areas relevant to the study. The pretest was conducted on a sample of 31 type 2 diabetics in the Endocrinology outpatient clinic at Trung Vuong hospital. Content validity was determined based on experts’ concurrence using content validity index for items (I-CVI). Face validity is assessed by participants in pretest. Internal consistency was measured using Cronbach’s alpha.

Results: Final version was equivalent with the original English version and easy to understand. I-CVI of 17 items were 1.00 in linguistic experts and greater than 0.83 in content experts. All 31 participants involved in the pretest commented that the items were very clear and acceptable regarding their socioeconomic background. Cronbach’s alpha coefficient was 0.76 – 0.93 for each subscale and 0.94 for the overall.

Conclusion: Vietnamese version of the DDS was reliable, face and content-valid to assess diabetes distress in type 2 diabetics among Vietnamese.

Background: Assessments of professional behaviors such as professionalism Mini clinical examination (PMEX) and OSCE (POSCE) are playing an important role in driving the practice professionalism in medical training. Simulation-based assessment or POSCE has been used to evaluate several professional attributes. However, few evidence of content validity proving that whether POSCE is really measuring specific professional attributes have been reported in medical education literature.

Methods:  The four-step process of developing FM POSCE was analyzed to highlight the validity evidence according framework of Downing (2003). Group of 5 independent FM experts from Vietnam, Boston University, US and Liege, Belgium evaluated the blueprints, scenarios and item lists on a scale (1-totally disagree to 5-totally agree) regarding to what extent test blueprint, cases and item lists were relevant to the content domains and cultural context. The results of their evaluation were considered as an evidence of content validity. The mean and standard deviation of the scores given by them were calculated using SPSS, 20.0.

Results: Important evidence of content validity were found in the process of developing POSCE. Content experts’ evaluation showed that all professional attributes represented medical professionalism. However, the adequacy of professional attributes to evaluate the broad construct of professionalism was controversial (M=3.75, SD=0.95). Cases are relevant to assess these professional attributes and culture. Only the cases of “Respecting the patient” and “Making altruistic decision” contained some inappropriate marking items (M=3.75, SD=0.95; M=3.00, SD=0.92).  

Discussion and conclusion: FM POSCE developed in Vietnamese context can assess six specific professional attributes. This study suggested a process of developing POSCE that has several features such as using both sources of expertise and medical literature to build up the content of POSCE to improve the content validity.