The German version of the Exercise in Mental Illness Questionnaire (EMIQ-G): Translation and testing of psychometric properties

Background: Physical activity (PA) shows many benefits for mental health. Mental health professionals play an important role in recommending PA to their patients. There is little research on PA recommendation behaviour in German mental health professionals. Aim of this study was to translate the Exercise in Mental Illness Questionnaire (EMIQ-HP) to German and test the psychometric properties of the translated version. Methods: We translated the questionnaire following the guidelines on the cross-cultural adaption of self-rating questionnaires and tested its 7-day test-retest reliability in a sample of 40 German mental health professionals using Intra-Class-Correlations (ICC) and Cohen's kappa (κ). Results: The German version of the questionnaire (EMIQ-G) can be found in supplement 1. The items and scales showed ICCs between 0.58 and 1.00 and κ between 0.35 and 1.00 while the vast majority showed excellent to almost perfect 7-day-retest reliability (>0.81). Conclusion: The EMIQ-G represents the first standardized German questionnaire for the assessment of mental health professionals view on PA in mental disorders. Its use in future research might help to generate further knowledge that might help to support patients with mental disorders to increase or maintain a health beneficial level of PA.