Intorduction: According to the World Health Organization's definition of health, it is a state of complete physical, mental, social and spiritual well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. This definition shows the importance of spirituality in the elderly’s health. Due to the lack of Persian questionnaire to assess spirituality among the Iranian elderly, the aim of this study was to assess validity and reliability of the Persian version of Spiritual Involvement and Beliefs Scale-Revised (SIBS-R) among Iran’s elderly population.

  Methods: In order to prepare the Persian version of the questionnaire, the standard method of the translation model ‘The International Quality of Life Assessment (IQOLA) Project’ was used for translating Spiritual Involvement and Beliefs Scale-Revised (SIBS-R) among Iran’s elderly population. To determine the reliability of the scale, Intra-Class Correlation (ICC), Cronbach’s Alpha and Test-Retest among 30 samples twice with two weeks durability were tested. For assessing the validity of the questionnaire in three levels, face validity (external validity), content validity and construct validity (exploratory factor analysis) were measured. Additionally, this study is a correlational study based on which the data on Iranian elderly was collected among 200 samples in 2012 and factor analysis was done by the software of SPSS 16.

  Findings: Findings extracted from the descriptive results of the present study indicated that there is no correlation among the demographic data collected included age, religion, education and spirituality. On the other hand, after carrying out exploratory factor analysis, with calculation of Test-Retest (p-value=0.8), intra-class correlation coefficient (p-value=0.003) and the calculated internal consistency with Cronbach's alpha coefficient 0.8, reliability of the questionnaire was confirmed, and in addition through exploratory factor analysis, construct validity of the questionnaire was verified.

Discussion: One of the most important issues in studying the functional consequences of the spirituality faced by researchers and experts is development of the convenient scales for assessment and intervention research among the elderly to improve their performance in this period. In this study, regarding the internal consistency and test-retest reliability of the questionnaire, as well as confirming the face validity (appearance), content validity, and factorial validity of the questionnaire, it can be stated that Persian translated version of the Spirituality Scale in this study corresponds to the main tool and it can be used as a valid assessment tool of the spirituality in Iran’s elderly population

Keywords: Spirituality, aging, religion, validity and reliability.

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