Persian Version of World Health Surveys Individual Questionnaire:A Validation Study

For the evaluation of the health status different questionnaires were used. The World Health Survey (WHS) Individual questionnaire has been applied in different countries as a short and standard tool. This questionnaire measures the health status of the individual in 9 domains. The objective of the current study was to validate the WHSIndividual questionnaire in Farsi.
In this validation study,forward-backward translation procedure was applied to the questionnaire. The validity of the questionnaire was assessed by 10 content and methodology experts and somepotential participants.Inter Rater Agreement (IRA), relevancy and clarity foreach item as well as comprehensiveness of the questionnairewere calculated.Reliability was measured usingCronbach`s alpha and Intra Class Correlation coefficient (ICC) through test-re-test in 20 convenient samples. To assess the discriminant validity, meanscoreswere compared between people with different self-rated health (SRH) status (good SRH=1743people and bad SRH=183).The means scores of the current questionnaire were also compared in two groups regarding the objective health (healthy=991, unhealthy=923).
Findings: Total clarity, relevancy and comprehensiveness of the questionnairewere 91%, 94% and 90%, respectively. ICC ranged between 0.68 and 1 with the median of 0.89. Chronbach`s Alpha was 0.76. The average scores in groups with good and bad self ­­-rated health were 14.3±13.2 and 41.9±17.9, respectively (p This study has provided some preliminary evidence on the reliability and validity of the Iranian version of the World Health Survey Individual Questionnaire.