Designing and determining psychometric properties of the Elderly Happiness Questionnaire

Objective: The purpose of this methodological study was to design and determine the psychometric properties of a new and specific questionnaire for assessing elderly happiness in the context of Iranian culture. Material and Methods: This study was a methodological research that was conducted from May 2018 to June 2019. It was conducted in four phases recommended by Schneider and et al (2004). In the first phase, content analysis was applied to explore the meaning of elderly happiness phenomenon. In the second phase, in order to achieve the factors of elderly happiness questionnaire, the factors of happiness were extracted based on the review of texts, measurement tools, and interviews with the participants. a questionnaire was created, using the results of the qualitative research implemented in the first phase, in conjunction with the inductions from the expert panel. In the third phase, the validity determination including face validity, content validity and construct validity were measured. In the fourth phase, internal consistency, and test- retest reliability were measured.  304 elderly people who were selected randomly participated in the last stage. Results: The initial 77 item questionnaire designed using the results of first and second phases of study, reduced to 39 items in the process of determining the face and content validity. The result of exploratory factor analysis showed that this questionnaire contains 5 factors including human rights, enjoyable life, good morals, health and spirituality. These 5 factors explained nearly 70.49% of the variance. The results of known groupschr('39') comparisons showed that this questionnaire could successfully discriminate between subgroups of elderly people in the indexes of gender and education status. The internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha) was 0.838–0.950. Test-retest reliability (ICC) of the questionnaire with interval time of two weeks was 0.95(p < 0.001). Conclusion: We concluded that the Elderly Happiness Questionnaire with 39 items in community-dwelling older samples is valid and reliable Thus, the questionnaire can be recommended for use as a trait-measure in Iranian older adults. It can be used among older adults in different settings such as clinical settings, homes and research environments by health care providers, psychologists and researchers.