The cross-cultural adaptation to Portuguese of the Dissociative Experiences Scale for screening and quantifying dissociative phenomena

This paper presents the cross-cultural adaptation to Portuguese of the Dissociative Experiences Scale, the worldwide most employed questionnaire for screening and quantifying dissociative phenomena. Two translations and their respective back-translations were performed, as well as the evaluation of the semantic equivalence, the preparation of the synthetic version, the pre-testing on the target population, the definition of the final version and a second pre-testing on the target population. A high level of semantic equivalence between the original instrument and the two pairs of translations and back-translations was observed regarding the referential and general meanings. The two pre-testing in the target population led to alterations in order to achieve the semantic and operational equivalence criteria. This work provides the first adaptation of a specific instrument to detect and quantify dissociative symptoms in the Brazilian context.