Objectives: Establishing social relationships and creating and reinforcing social networks among the elderly people may create social capital. Thus, this research aimed to translate Onyx and Bullen social capital questionnaire into Persian version and evaluate its validity and reliability for elderly people.
Methods & Materials: This cross-sectional study was conducted among 192 elderly people over 60 years old. To translate social capital instrument from English into Persian, we used the international quality of life assessment approach. Criterion validity of the instrument was using Geriatric Depression Scale (5 items), social health, and general health questionnaires. The obtained data were statistically analyzed.
Results: According to our findings with regard to quality of the translation (clarity of translation, common language use, and conceptual equivalence, as well as general quality of translation), translators 3 and 4 found most items had clarity of translation (86.6%), usage of common perception (76.3%), conceptual consistency (76.3%), and overall quality of translation (78.9%). In other words, all were at a satisfactory level. The results showed that from experts’ points of view, the Persian version of the questionnaire was good with regard to translation quality and acceptable at other aspects. In other words, it was not unacceptable with regard to any aspect. Interclass correlations (ICC) of the dimensions were more than 0.7. The Cronbach coefficient α was calculated as 0.96 for the overall scale. Factor analysis of this study among Iranian elderly found 7 factors, which had discreet differences with Onyx configuration. Thus, the questions related to neighborhood relations were put in the same factor with social cooperation, and some items related to social efficiency were put in the factor of social cooperation and some in the factor of trust feeling. These 7 factors all together explained 48.71% of the variance (KMO=0.835). The distribution of the variance of scores for 7 factors was as follows: social cooperation, 58.11%; trust feeling, 48.8%; life worthwhile, 44.8%; work relations, 83,6%; accepting differences, 79.6%; family relationships, 58.6%; and local solidarity, 83.6%. Our findings also showed a negative and significant relationship between depression level and social capital (P=0.001). There was also a positive and significant association between social and general health level with social capital (P=0.001).
Conclusion: The Persian version of the questionnaire for this population has acceptable levels of face validity based on clarity, simplicity, and understandability of the questions, answers, and explanations of the Persian version of the social capital questionnaire. This version of the questionnaire also had acceptable levels in terms of suitability of the translation of the questionnaire, its suitability for Iranian community, its understandability, and suitability for needs assessment, discriminate validity (the internal consistency of the Persian version of questionnaire), test-retest reliability (absolute, and relative), and internal consistency. Therefore, this instrument is suitable for evaluating the level of social capital among the Iranian elderly people.