Cross-cultural adaptation and validation of the VISA-P questionnaire in French

Introduction: The Victorian Institute of Sports Assessment–Patellar (VISA-P), originally developed for English-speaking patients, assesses the severity of patellar tendinopathy symptoms. Although this questionnaire has already been translated into different languages, it has never been adapted for French-speaking patients, which is surprising. Indeed, French is not only spoken by most than 275 millions of people all around the world. The aim of our study was to validate a French version and verify its psychometric properties.

Materials and Methods: The translation and cultural adaptation were performed according to international recommendations in six steps: initial translation, translation merging, back translation to the original language, expert committee review to test the pre-final version, and expert committee appraisal. Once the final French version (VISA-PF) was obtained, certain psychometric properties were assessed in 92 subjects were included and divided into three groups: pathological subjects (n = 28), asymptomatic subjects (n = 22) and sports-risk subjects (n = 42).

Results: The different members of the expert committee agreed with the final version. The average scores of the VISA-PF obtained were 53 (± 17) for the pathological group, 99 (± 2) for the healthy group and 86 (± 14) for the sports-risk group. The test-retest reliability of the VISA-PF was excellent with an intra-class correlation coefficient of 0.99 and good internal consistency (α = 0.9). Correlations between the VISA-PF and diverging measures of the SF-36 were low and the correlation coefficient values measured between the VISA-PF scores and converged items of the SF-36 were higher.

Conclusion: The VISA-PF is understandable, reliable and suitable for French-speaking patients with patellar tendinopathy.