Psychometric Properties of the Persian Version of the Self-Assessed Support Needs Questionnaire for Breast Cancer Cases

Background: It has been found that support given to women with breast cancer has a positive effect upontheir reactions to the illness and may even prolong their survival. Perceived support needs assessment in breastcancer women could be considered as a necessary part of nursing function. Aim: The purpose of this study wasto translate and culturally adapt the self-assessed support needs (SASN) questionnaire into Persian languageand to investigate its psychometric properties. Materials and
Methods: After forward-backward translationof the questionnaire and making appropriate changes, we selected 160 women with breast cancer as our studysample. The psychometric properties of the SASN, including its internal consistency, test retest reliability, andconstruct validity were evaluated through the known-groups technique.
Results: The calculated Kaiser MeyerOlkin was 0.756, indicating that the sample was sufficiently large to perform a satisfactory factor analysis. Thesix factors all together explained 50.7% of the variance; the first factor (diagnosing) explaining the biggest partof variance (10.9). Internal consistency reliability was 0.83 for the whole scale and the stability of test was 0.78.For the first factor, Cronbach’s alpha was 0.90 and factor loadings of scale’s items were found to deal withdiagnosis subscale. The domains described patients’ diagnosis, treatment, support, femininity and body image,family and friends and information.
Conclusions: The reliability and validity of the adapted version of the SASNwas shown to be satisfactory. Thus, it can be used to investigate self-assessed support needs of Iranian womensuffering from breast cancer since the SASN is a multi-domain scale.