CROSS-CULTURAL ADAPTATION OF VISUAL REPRODUCTION SUBTEST OF WECHSLER MEMORY SCALE FOURTH EDITION (WMS-IV) TO A BRAZILIAN CONTEXT

Objective: Brazilian versions of instruments to evaluate non-verbal memory are scarce. The Visual Reproduction (VR) subscales I and II of the Wechsler Memory Scale are considered the gold standard among memory assessment measures. The aim of the present study was to develop a cross-cultural adaptation of the Visual Reproduction subtest of the Wechsler Memory Scale–fourth edition (VR-IV), suitable for Brazil, and to evaluate its preliminary psychometric properties. Method: Participant assessment and data analysis followed the methodology recommended by the American Educational Research Association, the American Psychological Association, and the National Council on Measurement in Education (2009). Eighty-five healthy adult volunteers and 29 adult right-middle cerebral artery (RMCA) stroke patients were evaluated. The adaptation of the VR-IV involved a group of experts and translators who analysed conceptual, item, semantic, and operational equivalence. Some psychometric properties of the instrument were also evaluated. Results: All the equivalence categories were achieved in the Portuguese adaptation. Significant healthy group correlation coefficients were also obtained. Scale reliability analyses showed moderate correlations that indicated the temporal stability of the instrument. The RMCA stroke patients obtained lower raw scores in all tasks of the VR-IV in comparison to the control group. Conclusions: Our results indicate that the Portuguese adaptation of the VR-IV has cultural reliability and validity for use in Brazil. The performance of the RMCA stroke patients and paired controls was best evaluated using contrast scaled scores, in comparison to the performance using each variable separately. The contrast scaled scores enabled the observation that the RMCA stroke patients had limitations in encoding and retrieving learning information.