Evidências de validade de um questionário para avaliação do apoio social informal para idosos

Abstract

Population aging is a reality in Brazil and in the world, evidencing, besides a demographic transition, an epidemiological transition. New demands for the integral care of the elderly are present and to be considered, the multidimensionality of health, its social aspects should also be considered in health assessment. Among important social factors for the assessment of the elderly, Social Support, especially the informal one, deserves special mention. Thus, the objectives of this study were to construct and validate a questionnaire to evaluate informal social support for the elderly. It is a descriptive, observational and quantitative research. The project was approved by the research ethics committee of the Onofre Lopes University Hospital, and was performed between January and December 2016 in the city of Natal-RN and other locations in Brazil through face-to-face interviews with the elderly and a questionnaire virtually answered by the specialists. Inclusion criteria were: proven experience in the social support area (for specialists) or 60 years of age or older and have preserved cognitive ability (for the elderly). In the Content Validity (CV) stage, was evaluated by relevance of the items according to the General Content Validity Index (CVI) and per item and panel assembly were evaluated with the observations made by the specialists. In the Validity of Process Responses (VPR) stage, the understanding of the items by the target audience was evaluated. For factorial validity we proceeded with Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA). Using the statistical program M PLUS Version 7® was used. Variable grouping (type R) and factor extraction were performed with analysis of common factors, using oblique rotation Geomin. As exclusion criterion of the items was adopted a reference value greater than or equal to 0.35 of factorial load and greater or equal to 0.5 of commonality per item. To determine the amount of retained factors, the criteria of own values> 1, minimum cumulative explained variance of 60% and parallel Horn analysis were observed. In the CV stage with specialists, a total of 40 interviewees were obtained, 90% were PhD, 7.5% Masters and 2.5% Specialists. The general CVI was 0.88 and only one item had considered poor. After panel evaluation, two items were included and the others modified. In the VPR stage with the elderly, a total of 41 interviewees were obtained. After analyzing the panel of observations made by the elderly, the issues went through modifications for their improvement. A sample of 259 elderly people from the five regions of Brazil answered the questionnaire. After EFA, 4 items were excluded due to the poverty of their factorial loads and 4 factors were identified: "composition and extension of the social network", "support instrumental and availability", "reciprocity and longitudinality" and "support emotional support and social participation". The questionnaire showed a good relevance of the proposed items and the observations made by the interviewees allowed an approximation of the language used in the instrument, to the language used by the elderly. The instrument with 20 items and 4 retained factors presented good psychometric properties, such as: acceptable factor loads and excellent commonalities. We suggest 42 as the overall optimal cut score.