Iranian Version of Cancer-Related Fatigue Questionnaire: Construction and Validation

Background: Patients with cancer experience various physical and psychological complications during treatment. Fatigue is a common and often disabling medical symptom in patients with cancer. Objectives: It is necessary to have a reliable and valid tool to examine cancer-related fatigue in adults with cancer. Methods: This descriptive study was conducted on 150 patients with cancer that had referred to Shahid Sadoughi Hospital (Yazd/Iran). Data were collected by a researcher-made questionnaire that was designed for fatigue assessment. The reliability was determined using the Cronbach’s alpha and test-retest method. Factor analysis was used in SPSS/21 software to verify construct validity. Results: Face validity and content validity was confirmed through an expert panel. According to experts’ suggestions, unnecessary items were removed and required changes were made in the questionnaire. According to the results of factor analysis, this questionnaire has three categories including: Daily activities and general problems (ten questions), sleep problems (nine questions), and mental states and emotions (five questions). Cronbach’s alpha was more than 0.8 for all dimensions and was 0.93 for the entire scale. Intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC) was in the range of 0.84 to 0.92; also, ICC was 0.92 for the total questionnaire and was close to one for all dimensions of the questionnaire. In addition, the total mean fatigue was 53.44 ± 16.61, considering the total score of 100. There was a significant difference between total mean fatigue and gender, job, economic status, and type of cancer. Conclusions: This study shows that cancer-related fatigue questionnaire can be used as a tool with validity and reliability at all research levels.