Designing a Measurement Scale for Spiritual Health of the Elderly in Tehran/Iran (2019)

Background: Spiritual health is one of the important dimensions of health that causes the coherence and harmony of other dimensions of health in human beings. Due to the increasing number of elderly, considering the status of their health is important. Objectives: The present study was an attempt to design and evaluate a measurement instrument for spiritual health in the Iranian elderly, which is appropriate for the Iranian society. Methods: This mixed methods study used a sequential exploratory strategy. In the first phase, spiritual health items were extracted based on a review of the previous studies and interviews with experts and the elderly using direct content analysis. In the second phase, the standardized questionnaire was assessed by performing validity and reliability tests on 400 elderly residents of Tehran. The participants were selected based on the purposive sampling method from the elderly referring to nursing homes. To analyze the collected data, qualitative content analysis was employed. In the first phase, 45 items of the questionnaire were extracted based on the interviews. After quantitatively determining the face and content validity, six items were removed, and the questionnaire items were reduced to 39 items. Results: Exploratory factor analysis on this questionnaire identified five factors that explained a total of 52.2% of the total variance of the test. The Cronbach's alpha coefficient obtained confirmed the high internal consistency of the questionnaire (0.925). Also, a high correlation was reported between the test and retest with a 10-day interval (r = 0.997). In addition, a high and significant correlation was reported in the simultaneous implementation of the designed instrument with Paloutzin and Ellison’s spiritual health instrument (r = 0.76). Conclusions: In general, based on the present study's findings, the designed questionnaire has an acceptable level of validity and reliability and is usable for the elderly.