The Translation, Cultural Adaptation and Validation of the Rivermead Behavioural Memory Test Third Edition To Be Used With Arabic Populations With Acquired Brain Injuries.

Abstract

Background: Impairment in everyday memory is one of the most common cognitive impairments experienced by acquired brain injury (ABI) survivors. There is a need for a valid and reliable assessment tool in the Arabic language to allow for accurate identification of everyday memory problems. The aim of this research is to provide researchers and clinicians with a valid and reliable tool to assess everyday memory function in Arabic-speaking populations with acquired brain injuries. Methods: In the first phase, the Rivermead Behavioural Memory Test Third Edition (RBMT- 3), was translated and culturally adapted for use with Arabic-speaking populations. In phase two, the Arabic RBMT-3 was piloted in a sample of sixteen bilingual healthy volunteers to confirm the equivalence. In phase three, 100 Arabic-speaking healthy participants and 31 ABI patients were recruited in Saudi Arabia. Participants completed the Arabic RBMT-3, the Cognistat and the Prospective Retrospective Memory Questionnaire (PRMQ). The validity and reliability; and the impact of demographical variables on the performance on the Arabic RBMT-3 were investigated. Results: The pilot study results demonstrated that the Arabic RBMT-3 is equivalent to the English RBMT-3 and that there is initial evidence of acceptable parallel form reliability and excellent inter-rater reliability. In the validation study, the Arabic RBMT-3 demonstrated good content validity, concurrent validity, discriminative validity and parallel form reliability. However, the correlations between the RBMT-3 and the PRMQ were not significant (version1: r= -.19, p= 0.38; version 2: r= -0.87, p= 0.05). Therefore, ecological validity requires further investigation. No significant correlations were found between the Arabic RBMT-3 scores and age and level of education; however, statistically significant correlations were found between sex and country of origin for some of the RBMT-3 subtests. Finally, scaled scores and percentile norms were developed. XII Conclusion: The Arabic RBMT-3 is a valid and reliable tool to assess memory function in Arabic-speaking populations with ABI. Further investigation is required to ascertain its ecological validity and to expand normative data to represent the different age-groups of the target population. The tool should also be validated across different Arabic and clinical populations to ascertain its applicability and relevance outside Saudi Arabia.