Wheelchair skills test questionnaire for manual and powered wheelchair users: arabic translation, adaptation, and validation.

Everyone was recruited by convenience through three rehabilitation hospitals in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. People who manage at home without attending a clinic may have different skills, and the authors say their results cannot be generalised regionally or nationally. Four of the 52 people recruited were dropped because they left questions blank, which the authors accept may have removed the people who found the questionnaire hardest to complete. It is a self-report. It records what people believe they can do, and the authors state this can differ from how they actually perform. The translation used Modern Standard Arabic and was tested in one country; the authors point out that dialects and different environments across the Arabic-speaking world may change how items are understood. Only adults took part, so nothing here applies to children who use wheelchairs. There were too few people with any one condition, such as multiple sclerosis or Parkinson's disease, to check agreement separately for those groups. The manual version's daily performance domain was the least stable of the six, with a wider confidence interval than the rest.

The authors declared that no financial support was received for this work or its publication.

Do not read this as the questionnaire replacing hands-on testing. What was tested is a self-report of what users believe they can do, and the authors state this can differ from objective physical performance. Close agreement between two administrations nine days apart shows the questions are answered consistently, not that the answers are correct. The testing also took place only in Saudi Arabia, in Modern Standard Arabic, so how the tool behaves in other dialects and countries is untested.