Norwegian Cross-Cultural Adaptation of the Social and Communities Opportunities Profile-Mini for Persons with Concurrent Mental Health and Substance Use Disorders

Persons with concurrent mental health and substance use disorders often do not participate actively in society and remain marginalized. The promotion of social inclusion is important for the care of persons with concurrent disorders. To measure social inclusion, the Social and Communities Opportunities Profile (SCOPE) was developed, followed by its mini version for English-speaking people in Singapore. In Norway, there is no instrument available to measure social inclusion. Thus, the aim was cross-cultural adaptation of SCOPE Mini for persons with concurrent disorders. The Norwegian adaptation was performed using the systematic approach recommended by Beaton et al. After a forward–backward translation, the Norwegian SCOPE-Mini was pre-tested among 30 persons with a concurrent mental health and substance use disorder in three areas to check its psychometric properties. To evaluate comprehensibility and applicability, participants were asked five open questions. The Norwegian cross-cultural adaptation of SCOPE Mini showed acceptable psychometric properties and was considered comparable to the original version. The results of the pre-test showed no linguistic inconsistency, but some indications of the necessity of semantic adaptation regarding the cultural context and persons with concurrent disorders. The Norwegian SCOPE Mini may be a practical tool for health professionals, social workers, and researchers to measure social inclusion among a vulnerable group such as persons with a concurrent mental health and substance use disorder. However, given the relatively small sample size in our study, further research on the validity and reliability of the instrument is recommended.