Internal and external aspects of freedom of choice in mental health: cultural and linguistic adaptation of the Hungarian version of the Oxford CAPabilities questionnaire—Mental Health (OxCAP-MH)

BACKGROUND: A link between mental health and freedom of choice has long been established, in fact, the loss of freedom of choice is one of the possible defining features of mental disorders. Freedom of choice has internal and external aspects explicitly identified within the capability approach, but received little explicit attention in capability instruments. This study aimed to develop a feasible and linguistically and culturally appropriate Hungarian version of the Oxford CAPabilities questionnaire—Mental Health (OxCAP-MH) for mental health outcome measurement. METHODS: Following forward and back translations, a reconciled Hungarian version of the OxCAP-MH was developed following professional consensus guidelines of the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research and the WHO. The wording of the questionnaire underwent cultural and linguistic validation through content analysis of cognitive debriefing interviews with 11 Hungarian speaking mental health patients in 2019. Results were compared with those from the development of the German version and the original English version with special focus on linguistic aspects. RESULTS: Twenty-nine phrases were translated. There were linguistic differences in each question and answer options due to the high number of inflected, affixed words and word fragments that characterize the Hungarian language in general. Major linguistic differences were also revealed between the internal and external aspects of capability freedom of choices which appear much more explicit in the Hungarian than in the English or German languages. A re-analysis of the capability freedom of choice concepts in the existing language versions exposed the need for minor amendments also in the English version in order to allow the development of future culturally, linguistically and conceptually valid translations. CONCLUSION: The internal and external freedom of choice impacts of mental health conditions require different care/policy measures. Their explicit consideration is necessary for the conceptually harmonised operationalisation of the capability approach for (mental) health outcome measurement in diverse cultural and linguistic contexts. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s40359-021-00660-0.