Reliability and Validity of the Chinese Version of the Brief Illness Perception Questionnaire for Patients with Coronary Heart Disease

Aim: The aim of this study was to evaluate the psychometric properties of the Chinese version of Brief Illness Perception Questionnaire (BIPQ) as an instrument for assessing patients' illness belief in Taiwanese patients with coronary heart disease.Background: The English BIPQ is used instrument for assessing patients' view of illness. There is good evidence for the psychometric properties of the English version. However, the reliability and validity of Chinese version of BIPQ has not been established.Design: A cross-sectional design using questionnaire survey was carried out at a Teaching Hospital in New Taipei City.Methods: The Chinese BIPQ was administered to a purposive sample of 102 patients with coronary heart disease and repeated on 48 of them four weeks later in 2010-2011.Results: The Chinese BIPQ had acceptable intercorrelaton and test-retest reliability, with Cronbach alpha of 0.538-0.757. There was acceptable construct validity with significant (p＜0.05 or ＜0.001) correlations between anxiety and depression subscales of the Hospital Anxiety Depression Scale and physical function, mental health, vitality subscales of Short Form 36. The difference was detected by the number of risk factors in consequences subscale of Chinese BIPQ indicating discriminative validity.Conclusion: The findings of the study support the Chinese BIPQ as being a reliable and valid tool for measuring patient beliefs. The instrument may be used in clinical practice to understand the illness perceptions of cardiac patients.