The portuguese version of the personal health scale: a validation study in southern Brazil.

UNLABELLED The Personal Health Scale is a concise instrument for comprehensive culture-informed and self-rated assessment of general health status and well-being. It is composed of 10 questions that appraise different health dimensions collated from the international literature, including aspects ranging from somatic and psychological domains to social functioning and insight. PURPOSE In this investigation, results of a study conducted in Southern Brazil to test and validate the Portuguese version of the Personal Health Scale (PHS-Pt) are presented. METHOD This study analyzes data from a sample of 120 Brazilian volunteers (90 patients and 30 health care professionals). All patients completed the Portuguese version of the Personal Health Scale under a minimal guidance by trained examiners, who followed standardized instructional procedures. RESULTS The internal consistency of the PHS-Pt attained a Cronbach's a of 0.75 among patients and of 0.69 among health care professionals. The test-retest reliability correlation coefficient yielded a score of 0.82. Furthermore, the PHS-Pt was able to detect a significant discriminating validity between the 2 evaluated samples (P < .001). CONCLUSIONS The original English version of the Personal Health Scale was successfully adapted to Portuguese as methodologically demonstrated herein. The PHS-Pt constitutes a reliable and trustworthy research instrument for evaluating health status in Brazil, since it is appropriately designed to distinguish different groups of volunteers regarding their health status.