A short questionnaire to assess changes in lifestyle-related behavior upon stressful events: translation, cultural adaptation, and validation study for the Portuguese language.

The COVID-19 pandemic impacted considerably university students' health and well-being, justifying the development and use of validated measuring tools to analyse and assess mental/physical health, and well-being throughout consecutive confinements (or lockdowns), or any other endured stressful periods. This study aims to describe the translation, the cultural adaptation, and the validation of a short questionnaire to assess changes in lifestyle-related behavior, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, in Portuguese university students. We enrolled 128 university students (mean age: 38.3 [13.0] studying at/attending the Portuguese Catholic University). The validation study included Cronbach alpha for the whole scale, corrected item-total correlations, and Cronbach alpha to evaluate the scale reliability whenever items were deleted. Exploratory factor analysis was performed, and 3 factors were extracted through the principal component extraction with varimax rotation. Communalities were also observed. The mean and standard deviation of the total questionnaire score was -1.73 (6.65). No difference was seen between genders. However, participants who already had COVID-19 symptoms, and participants who perceived their health as worse than in the prepandemic period, presented lower questionnaire scores. Internal consistency of 0.74, as measured by Cronbach alpha, was considered as acceptable. Exploratory factor analysis corroborated the validity of the tool. This short questionnaire could be applied to detect changes in lifestyle-related behavior throughout stressful situations in a Portuguese university student's population.