ADAPTATION OF THE UKRAINIAN VERSION OF THE “BODY PERCEPTION QUESTIONNAIRE – SHORT FORM”

Abstract

The article presents an approach to the perception of body sensations and their measurement by Dr. Porges. The Body Perception Questionnaire, developed by Dr. Porges and colleagues, is reviewed. The stages of translation and adaptation of the questionnaire in the Ukrainian sample are described.
Body awareness is becoming more important in diseases, including anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, autism, schizophrenia, and eating disorders. There is a growing interest in, and access to, knowledge of how physiological and nervous processes are related to subjective body experience and psychiatric dysfunction.
There are many tools for measuring the subjective experience of body awareness and the perception of body sensations, but few have been designed with strict psychometric requirements in mind. In 1993, Dr. Porges and colleagues developed the Body Perception Questionnaire (BPQ). The full version of BPQ, with 122 statements, assesses body awareness, autonomic nervous system reactivity, cognitive-emotional-somatic stress response, response styles, cognitive stress, and health history. The aspects of BPQ that have generated the highest scientific interest are the subscales of body awareness and autonomous reactivity. Thus, to develop a shorter and more convenient version of the methodology, the authors of the questionnaire focused on two subscales that may prove most useful for the research. This version of the questionnaire has 46 statements and is named Body Perception Questionnaire – Short Form (BPQ-SF).
The adaptation of the Body Perception Questionnaire – Short Form (BPQ-SF) took place in four stages. Thus, the first stage is the analysis of the initial theoretical positions of the authors of the questionnaire. The second stage is the translation of the questionnaire text and instructions (translation from English into Ukrainian). For this purpose, the method of forward and reverse translation was used. The third stage is the psychometric analysis. The reliability and validity indicators of the Body Perception Questionnaire – Short Form (BPQ-SF) have been verified. Analysis of the internal consistency and the test-retest method was performed to verify the reliability. External validity analysis was performed to validate. For this purpose, the technique of measuring the perception (tracking accuracy) of the heartbeat (Mental Tracking method) was performed to assess the body sensitivity, which acted as an external criterion. The fourth stage is the standardization of the obtained indicators: the establishment of norms and levels of expression of subscales of the questionnaire for Ukrainians. T-points are selected for standardization. The recalculation of the raw scores was done using the code in the R program provided by the questionnaire authors. To sum up, the stages of adaptation meet all the requirements and norms, which is the reason to consider the adaptation into the Ukrainian language as successful.
The prospect of further research is to approve the methodology on a more significant number of respondents and on respondents with different mental and somatic diagnoses to establish features of body awareness.