How Older People Experience the Age-Friendliness of Their City: Development of the Age-Friendly Cities and Communities Questionnaire.

Jeroen Dikken,Rudy F.M Van Den Hoven,Joost Van Hoof,Willeke H Van Staalduinen,Loes M.T Hulsebosch-Janssen

doi:10.3390/ijerph17186867

Abstract

The World Health Organization engages cities and communities all over the world in becoming age-friendly. There is a need for assessing the age-friendliness of cities and communities by means of a transparently constructed and validated tool which measures the construct as a whole. The aim of this study was to develop a questionnaire measuring age-friendliness, providing full transparency and reproducibility. The development and validation of the Age Friendly Cities and Communities Questionnaire (AFCCQ) followed the criteria of the COnsensus-based Standards for selection of health Measurement INstruments (COSMIN). Four phases were followed: (1) development of the conceptual model, themes and items; (2) initial (qualitative) validation; (3) psychometric validation, and (4) translating the instrument using the forward-backward translation method. This rigorous process of development and validation resulted in a valid, psychometrically sound, comprehensive 23-item questionnaire. This questionnaire can be used to measure older people’s experiences regarding the eight domains of the WHO Age-Friendly Cities model, and an additional financial domain. The AFCCQ allows practitioners and researchers to capture the age-friendliness of a city or community in a numerical fashion, which helps monitor the age-friendliness and the potential impact of policies or social programmes. The AFCCQ was created in Dutch and translated into British-English.

Highlights

For over a decade, the World Health Organization (WHO) has been involved in engaging and assisting cities and communities all over the world in becoming “age-friendly” [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10]
The step-by-step rigorous process of development and validation resulted in a valid, psychometrically sound, comprehensive 23-item questionnaire: The Age-Friendly Cities and Communities Questionnaire (AFCCQ) which is reported in full transparency
To date, such a validated tool was lacking, and many cities trying to assess their age-friendliness had to resort to a qualitative or mixed methodology approach, which was often based on the Checklist of Essential Features of Age-Friendly

Summary

Introduction

The World Health Organization (WHO) has been involved in engaging and assisting cities and communities all over the world in becoming “age-friendly” [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10]. The WHO proposed that policies, services, and structures in an age-friendly city, which are related to the physical and social environment, are designed to support and enable older people to “age actively”. A growing number of cities and communities worldwide are striving to better meet the needs of their older. Res. Public Health 2020, 17, 6867; doi:10.3390/ijerph17186867 www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph

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