[The Reliability and Validity of the Turkish Version of the World Health Organization Quality of Life Instrument-Older Adults Module (WHOQOL-Old)]

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 (sen------sory abilities, autonomy, past, present and future activities, so-cial 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).