Designing and determining psychometric properties of the knowledge, attitude, and practice questionnaire for the use of medicinal plants among older adults.

Background: Due to the occurrence of chronic diseases, older adults demonstrate more inclination to use various drugs. In fact, they constitute the major proportion to consume medicines for the many age-related diseases and often use medicinal plants along with synthetic medicine. Therefore, due to the tendency of the elderly to use medicinal plants and the lack of sufficient documentation on their consumption of medicinal plants, the present study was conducted to design and determine psychometric properties of a questionnaire of knowledge, attitude, and practice of the elderly regarding the use of medicinal plants.

Materials and methods: This study was conducted in two phases: designing the questionnaire and estimating its validity and reliability in 2020. In this study, which was performed in 2020, the instrument was a questionnaire to measure knowledge, attitude, and practice, designed using scientific sources, studies, and expert opinions. To calculate content validity, the ratio coefficient and index were consulted by asking the opinions of 12 experts. Also, a test-retest method was used to assess the reliability of the questionnaire.

Results: The 43-item questionnaire addressed the three aspects of knowledge, attitude, and practice of the elderly with 11, 8, and 11 items to evaluate knowledge, attitude, and practice, respectively. In the present study, the content ratio and content index were 0.79 and 0.8, respectively. The correlation coefficient calculations demonstrated the favorable status of the questionnaire based on the test-retest method.

Conclusion: The present researcher-made questionnaire has met validity and reliability requirements and can be used by other researchers as an appropriate questionnaire.