Investigation of Factor Structure of Persian Version of Functional Gait Assessment in Iranian Elderly

Objectives: The present study investigated the factor structure of Persian version of Abstract Functional gait assessment for identifying falling risk in Iranian elderly. Methods & Materials: The study was designed 200 subjects divided into two falling history positive and falling history negative (each including 100 subjects). Subjects were community-dwelling adults aged 60-90 years of Tehran. Criteria for entering the study, was acquiring minimum score of 24 from 30 in the MMSE scale. All subjects, performed items of FGA and their data were collected by researcher. FGA consisted of 10 items that measure functional status of subjects in range from 0 to 3 by Likert method. Data were analysed by means of exploratory factor analysis and Principle Component Analysis with Varimax Rotation and t-student. Results: The results showed that the FGA consists of two factors. These two factors predict the 52.53 percent of total variance based on Scree plot and pattern of factor weights were proposed. All items have higher than accepted factor load (0.5), so that ranged from 0.523 to 0.846. Conclusion: The results showed that the Persian version of FGA in the Iranian elderly is acceptably consistent with its English version and it could be used to identify elderly at risk of falling.