Validation of the Chinese version of Neurobehavioral Cognitive Status Examination

Abstract

This study was aimed to evaluate the content, substantive and discriminative validity of the NCSE for assessing cognitive function of Chinese stroke patients. The equivalence of the Chinese version NCSE was substantiated by an expert panel review. Relevance and representativeness of the test content were also evaluated. Culturally irrelevant test items were identified under the attention, language, memory, and reasoning sub-tests. Item analysis using item difficulty, discriminative, and internal consistency indices (Alpha = .37 to .82) indicated that most of the original and revised sub-tests behaved as expected. Results from the field test on stroke patients (n = 62) and their normal counterpart (n = 33) revealed significant differences in attention, calculation, and similarity functions (p = .00 to .05) between the two groups. Findings of this study demonstrated the importance of rigorous evaluation of cognitive assessment instruments when they are used for patients with different cultural background and language. The Chinese version NCSE was found useful in discriminating stroke patients with cognitive dysfunction from the normal group.