The translation process of the Culturally Sensitive Active Aging Scale for Community-Dwelling Older Adults in Pakistan

Abstract

Background: Active aging is define as older adults remaining active, connected, and contributing to society. To assess active aging in Pakistani elders, there is a scarcity of research tools to assess Active Aging levels in community-based older adults in Pakistan. Therefore, the aim of this study was to translate and validate the original English version of the Active Aging Scale into an Urdu version to measure active aging in community-based older adults in Pakistan. Methods: We followed the guidelines of the International Society of Pharmacy Economic and Outcome Research (ISPOR) to translate the scale. The first phase consists of translation processes; the second phase is all about the validity and reliability of the scale. Construct validity, concurrent validity, and reliability were established for a 160-person sample of community-based older adults. The finding of test-retest reliability was performed after a two-week interval on the remaining 30% of the sample. For concurrent validity, the Successful Aging Scale (SAS) Urdu version was used as the gold standard and applied at the same time on the same sample. Data were analyzed in SPPSS version 23, and AMOS version 23. Results: Our study pooled 29 items on the Active Aging Scale out of a possible 36. Two items were removed in the first process as not relevant to the context and two items that were not maintained inter-item covariance that is less than the value of 0.30 were removed. In the confirmatory factor analysis, three items with values below 0.40 in Varimax with Kaiser Normalization Rotation. Item loads ranged from 46 to 0.90, and were found to explain 65.42% of the total variance. Confirmatory factor analysis of the AAS shows Chi-squared (X2/df = 2.24) as the degree of freedom is acceptable when <3.00 in model fit indices. The root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA) is 0.042, the goodness of fit index (GFI) is 0.92, the adjusted goodness of fit index (AGFI) is 0.94, and the comparative fit index (CFI) values are 0.92 and 0.96, respectively, showing the good fit indices of the model. The test and retest reliability of the scale was significant (p=<0.05), and the Cronbach alpha of the scale is 0.92, which is reliable.