The objective of this article is to translate, to adapt and to validate the National College Health Risk Behavior Survey to apply at Brazilian college students. 208 college students from the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE) and University of Pernambuco (UPE) participated in the study. The validation was carried through in five stages: (1) translation; (2) retrotranslation; (3) correction and semantic adaptation (cultural adaptation); (4) face validation; (5) test-retest. Adaptations were done to deal with any semantic disagreements found between translation and retrotranslation. After face validation, the questionnaire was reduced from 96 to 52 questions. From the 11 items analyzed, the majority presented good and perfect Kappa: security and violence (Kappa=0.89); suicide (Kappa=1.00); use of the tobacco (Kappa=0.90); drinking consumption (Kappa=0.78); cocaine and other drugs consumption (Kappa=0.70); sexual behavior (Kappa=0,88) and corporal weight (Kappa=0.89). Only the item about feeding presented weak Inter-examiner Kappa (Kappa = 0.26) and the topic on health information presented moderate Kappa (Kappa=0.56). The average Kappa for all items was good (0.76). The instrument may be considered validated in the Portuguese language in Brazil with acceptable reproducibility.
Health behavior; Cross-cultural comparison; Reproducibility of results; Questionnaires
