Persian translation and assessing the validity and reliability of the Questionnaire of Health Seeking Behavior of women living with HIV

Introduction: Health seeking behavior (HSB) is a highly important concept for assessment of health access and services. This study was performed to evaluate the validity and reliability of the Persian version of the Questionnaire of Health Seeking Behavior of women living with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Material and methods: After obtaining permission from the questionnaire author we started our study in April 2018. We used the forward-backward method according to World Health Organization guidelines. In the first stage, qualitative assessment for assessing face and content validity was done by using 10 experts' and 10 HIV-positive women's ideas during panel and quantitative assessment was done using the content validity ratio (CVR) and content validity index (CVI). Reliability assessment was done among 80 HIV women by Cronbach's alpha. We conducted a pre-test among 10 HIV-positive women to discover any possible problems or issues. Results: Internal reliability, and construct validity of the questionnaire were determined among expert and HIV-positive women participants. Overall internal reliability (Cronbach's alpha = 0.81) was high. SPSS 16 was used to analyze data, using analytical statistical methods including the chi(2) test. After considering the quality of validity and the content of comments, the values of all the items, such as the CVI 0.93 and CVR 0.97, were obtained. Conclusions: The results represented the validity and reliability of the Persian version of the questionnaire to estimate the HSB, and it is possible to use it as an assessment tool.