Transcultural adaptation to the Awajún language and psychometric analysis of the Woman Abuse Screening Tool (WAST) in Peruvian women

BACKGROUND: Intimate partner violence disproportionately affects women from Peruvian Indigenous communities, and the lack of validated instruments in native languages limits timely detection. OBJECTIVE: To culturally adapt the Woman Abuse Screening Tool (WAST) into Awajún and examine evidence of validity based on internal structure, reliability, and measurement invariance among Awajún women in Peru. METHODS: An instrumental study was conducted. The adaptation process followed a sequential procedure including forward-backward translation, translator consensus, expert review using Aiken's V coefficient, and a focus group with bilingual speakers. The adapted WAST was subsequently administered to 403 Awajún women aged 18 years and older from the San Martín region, selected through non-probability sampling. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was performed using the WLSMV estimator, measurement invariance analyses (configural, metric, scalar, and strict) were conducted across sociodemographic variables, and Cronbach's alpha and McDonald's omega coefficients were estimated. RESULTS: The unidimensional model demonstrated adequate fit indices (χ²(28) = 22.601; CFI = 0.994; TLI = 0.991; RMSEA = 0.054 [90% CI 0.032-0.076]; SRMR = 0.035). Reliability was high (α = 0.92; ω = 0.92), and convergent validity showed an average variance extracted of AVE = 0.61. In addition, strict measurement invariance was supported across age, educational level, and marital status (ΔCFI < 0.01; ΔRMSEA < 0.01). CONCLUSIONS: The Awajún version of the WAST is a brief, valid, reliable, and culturally appropriate measure for screening intimate partner violence among Peruvian Awajún women, enabling meaningful comparisons across the evaluated sociodemographic subgroups.