Translation of the Nursing Clinical Facilitators Questionnaire (NCFQ) to Norwegian language

The translation and adaptation of English instruments to be used with populations speaking other languages is an important and complex process which is attracting increased attention in nursing and health-related research. The aim of this article is to describe the translation process of the Nursing Clinical Facilitators Questionnaire (NCFQ) for testing in Norway. The instrument is a 28-item-questionnaire with a Likert-type (1–5) scale ranging from the descriptions “strongly agree (1) to strongly disagree (5)”. The aim of the instrument is to measure the efficiency of, and satisfaction with the supervision received from the nurse students’ perspective. The NCFQ questionnaire was translated in six phases. The translation process was conducted systematically by applying the three methods described in the literature: the methods of forward-translation, back-translation and comparison followed by an empirical study (pilot test). The methods were chosen to test the quality of translation, establish semantic equivalence of the translated instrument and to estimate the cross-cultural relevance of the instrument. The translation process has given prerequisites to use the NCFQ questionnaire in a larger study and a possibility to compare different models for supervision of nursing students in the clinical part of their education.