Development and Psychometric Evaluation of a Socioeconomic Status Questionnaire for Urban Households (SESIran): The Preliminary Version

BACKGROUND The aim of present study was to develop and validate an appropriate socioeconomic status (SES) assessment questionnaire to be used through health studies in Iranian urban households. METHODS The study was conducted through a mixed method study design in Tabriz, northwest of Iran in 2014. It was conducted in several stages including: development of initial version, qualitative study, feasibility evaluation, and assessment of the validity as well as the reliability. The internal consistency, test-retest reliability, content validity, concurrent validity and construct validity were assessed. RESULTS With respect to the assessment of construct validity, 5 domains (factors) were extracted includ-ing: main factor (α=0.84), self-evaluation of expenditure capacity (α=0.96), wealth (α=0.70), home and furniture (α=0.66) and costs related to health (α=0.55). Intraclass correlation coefficient was above 0.6 for all factors except for wealth domain. CONCLUSION The questionnaire developed appeared to be a valid and reliable SES assessment tool. It may be of value to be used not only as a complementary questionnaire in most health surveys or clini-cal studies, but also as a main questionnaire in health equity and health economics research.