Turkish adaptation and validity- reliability study of awareness body chart

This study was carried out to state the cross-cultural adaptation and validity and reliability of the Awareness Body Chart (ABC) by translating it into Turkish. ABC is a visual scale that evaluates body awareness with the colouring method over the male and female diagrams divided into 51 regions, taking into account the anatomical structures. Body awareness, which consists of efferent and afferent nerve pathways between body structures and CNS, is the perception of sensory information coming from one's own body and the outside world and processing this information in the brain. Body awareness is a concept that can be changed by the person's physiological body perception, which includes visual, tactile, olfactory, gustatory, auditory, proprioceptive, vestibular and interoceptive sensory inputs. It interacts with cultural pressures, beliefs, attitudes, memories, prejudices. The study consisted of 229 healthy and 40 depressive participants. Translation and cross-cultural adaptation were made accordingly to Beaton's 6-step procedure. The Turkish version of the ABC was created according to the procedure steps. The mean age of the participants was 20.99±2.18 years. Internal consistency was evaluated in validity and reliability analyses, and ABC was found to be highly reliable. (α = 0.942) A test-retest comparison was performed after the second measurement was made two weeks later to examine ABC's reproducibility and temporal invariance. (n=53) As a result, the Intraclass Correlation Coefficient (ICC) was found to be 0.993, and a significant increase was observed in the retest result. (p < 0.05) In the Factor Analysis, it was found that the scale items could be grouped under a single factor considering the original structure of the scale, and 57.68% of the variance of ABC could be explained. It was found that ABC is a scale that discriminates sensitively between healthy individuals and depressive individuals. (p<0.001) Consequently, it was determined that the Awareness Body Chart is a valid and reliable assessment scale inTurkish that can evaluate body awareness in adults. Keywords: Awareness Body Chart, body awareness, depression, validity, reliabity