Measuring quality of life in older adults

BACKGROUND The Adult Social Care Outcomes Toolkit was developed to measure outcomes of social care in England. In this study we translated the four level self-completion version (SCT-4) of the ASCOT for use in the Netherlands and performed a cross-cultural validation. METHODS The ASCOT SCT-4 was translated into Dutch following international guidelines, including two forward and back translations. The resulting version was pilot tested among frail older adults using think-aloud interviews. Furthermore, using a subsample of the Dutch ACT-study, we investigated test-retest reliability and construct validity and compared response distributions with data from a comparable English study. RESULTS The pilot tests showed that translated items were in general understood as intended, that most items were reliable, and that the response distributions of the Dutch translation and associations with other measures were comparable to the original English version. Based on the results of the pilot tests, some small modifications and a revision of the Dignity items were proposed for the final translation, which were approved by the ASCOT development team. The complete original English version and the final Dutch translation can be obtained after registration on the ASCOT website (http://www.pssru.ac.uk/ ascot). CONCLUSION This study provides preliminary evidence that the Dutch translation of the ASCOT is valid, reliable and comparable to the original English version. We recommend further research to confirm the validity of the modified Dutch ASCOT translation.