Tradução e adaptação cultural da Escala Relational Communication Scale for Observational Measurement of Doctor-Patient Interactions (RCS-O) para a língua portuguesa do Brasil

Abstract

Introduction: About 60% of our communication is nonverbal. Few interventions designed to improve doctors´ and medical students’ nonverbal behavior are reported in the medical education research and as a trainable skill, the existence of appropriate instruments for teaching and assessing nonverbal behavior of physicians and medical students is mandatory. Objective: To translate and culturally adapt the Relational Communication Scale for Observational measurement of doctor-patient interactions (RCS-O) to Brazilian Portuguese. Material and methods: Translation and cultural adaptation were performed in stages including back translation, review of items through modified Delphi technique and pre-test. Results: The RCS-O title and three items required review after back translation and author’s comments. The language coordinator adjusted 9 (26,4%) items that belonged, generally, to the intimacy domains and were adjusted due to ambiguity/polysemy. Likewise, after pretest and as suggested by observers, research and language coordinators replaced two words on account of their ambiguous meanings. Conclusion: The Brazilian final version of the RCS-O is a suitable scale that may be introduced, after validation, as an instrument for teaching and assessing interpersonal communication skills in Brazilian medical schools. We hope this study may encourage health educators to invest in the teaching and assessment of nonverbal communication skills in other countries so that the cultural components of communication may be further explored.