Construct validation

Family physicians perceive that gut feelings, i.e. a ‘sense of reassurance’  or a ‘sense of alarm’, play a substantial role in diagnostic reasoning but a measuring instrument for further research was still lacking. We succeeded to validate a short questionnaire measuring the presence of gut feelings in diagnostic reasoning. It enables quantitative research into the role of gut feelings and their diagnostic value in family physicians’ diagnostic reasoning. (see http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2296/14/1)

Linguistic validation

For this publication and to allow a broad application of the Dutch-language questionnaire we translated the questionnaire into American-English using a formal linguistic validation procedure. This involved two separate forward-backward translations, a consensus meeting and a check on cultural misunderstandings by ten US family physicians. A British-English version has been obtained in a similar way and is available too (see button on left side ‘Questionnaire’ for all versions).