Development of the Comprehensive Geriatric Assessment Scale for Chinese Elderly

Objective To establish a comprehensive geriatric assessment scale which fit the situations of Chinese old people most, and to provide an evaluation tool for the proposal and intervention of functional health problems for the elderly. Methods The comprehensive geriatric assessment scale was produced by Delphi method combing with Chinese cultural background, some methods such as literature review and experts evaluation were conducted. The manuscript of this questionnaire was developed through Delphi and pre-experiment. Then the manuscript questionnaires were used among 300 old people, to analyze and assess the reliability, validity and reactivity. Results The experiment analysis demonstrated that the total Cronbach alpha coefficient was 0.909 and that of each index ranged from 0.718-0.960, most of the dimension-related coefficients were over 0.5. The construct validity was validated by factor analysis and the cumulative contribution rate was up to 76.88%. Results of non-parametric test on reactivity showed that the differences of total scores and each dimension' scores and substitute scores between the elderly from different institutions were statistically significant (P<0.01). Conclusion The comprehensive geriatric assessment scale owns a reasonable reliability, validity and reactivity, and this scale can be used as an evaluation instrument for the finding and intervention of the elder's health problems.