Abstract

Objectives: The Edinburgh Handedness Inventory (EHI) is the most common tool in determining handedness. It consists of 10 tasks and asks the patient which hand he prefers for those activities. The validity and reliability of the Turkish version of the scale have not been analyzed. Therefore, the aim of this study was to adapt the EHI for Turkish language and to test its validity and reliability.

Methods: The translation of EHI into Turkish was performed by 2 physiotherapists and back-translation was done by a physiotherapist with native English. Healthy young volunteers were included in the study for the validity and reliability analysis. Age, gender and dominant side reported by the participant were recorded. Participants filled the scale twice with a 7-day interval. Test-retest reliability of the questionnaire was analyzed with Pearson's correlation analysis method.

Results: A total of 151 participants (113 females and 38 males) included in the study and the average age was 22.6 ± 1.7. Only 11 participants reported their dominant side as left. It was seen that self-reported dominant side completely (100%) matched with the scale-based dominant side. It means that all right-handed individuals had positive EHI scores and all left-handed ones had negative scores. EHI test and re-test scores were correlated in an “excellent” level (r: 0.912; p

Key words: handedness, hand dominance, Edinburgh Handedness Inventory, validity, reliability