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Abstract
Purpose: To determine the psychometric properties of the Turkish version of the World Health Organization Quality of Life Instrument-Older Adults Module (WHOQOL-Old).
Methods: The Turkish version of the WHOQOL-OLD was administered to 527 older (> 65 years) adults living in urban, suburban, and rural areas of Manisa Province, Turkey. The WHOQOL-OLD module consists of 24 items assigned to 6 facets (sensory abilities, autonomy, past, present and future activities, social participation, death and dying, and intimacy) and is a supplementary module of WHOQOL-BREF. The WHOQOL-BREF and GDS-30 were also administered to the participants. A confirmatory approach was used during reliability and validity analysis. SPSS v.10.0 and LISREL v.8.54 were used for analysis.
Results: Mean age of the participants was 71.06 ± 5.20 years and the overall WHOQOL-OLD score was 56.02 ± 11.86. In all, 54.5% of the participants were female and 60.5% reported to be in poor health. Both ceiling and floor effects of the WHOQOL-OLD were satisfactory (< 0.05%). Alpha values for the facets and overall scale (range: 0.68-0.88) (> 0.70), and item total correlations and overall scale success were satisfactory. As a measure of the construct validity of the scale, confirmatory factor analysis showed very high CFI values (range: 0.936-0.999) for each of the domains. Convergence of WHOQOL-OLD facet scores on WHOQOL-BREF domains and WHOQOL-OLD were very fine in general.
Conclusions: The psychometric properties of the Turkish version of the WHOQOL-OLD were acceptable, indicating that the scale is reliable and valid for use with older Turkish adults (> 65 years).
Key Words: Older adults, Cultural adaptation, reliability and validity, quality of life
INTRODUCTION
Today, public health policies, both in the developed and developing world, are increasingly directed towards maintaining the elderly populations' independence and integration with the wider community. The WHO (2007) reports that in 2000 there were 600 million people aged 60 years and over, and that there will be 1.2 billion by 2025 and 2 billion by 2050. The WHO also suggests that populations in developing countries will become elderly before they become rich, while those in industrialized countries will become rich before they become elderly, emphasizing that worldwide all countries need to be prepared to address the consequences of aging populations. As it was stated for the rationale...