Cross Cultural Validity and Reliability of the Five-Item Social Frailty Scale

Abstract

OBJECTIVES The validity and reliability of social frailty indexes among different populations have been scarcely investigated. The aim of this study is to investigate the validity and reliability of the Five-Item Social Frailty Scale (SFS) in the Turkish population. METHODS A total of 308 patients aged 65 years or over were included in the study. All participants underwent a comprehensive geriatric assessment. The SFS was translated into Turkish using the forward-backward translation method. After translation, it was tested for intelligibility on 15 patients. For the inter-rater reliability assessment, questions were asked to 55 patients by two experts, sequentially on the same day in different rooms. For intra-rater reliability, 50 patients were asked the same questions by the same expert at one-week intervals. Intra-rater and inter-rater consistency were evaluated. Correlations between the SFS and geriatric assessment tests were performed. RESULTS The mean age of the 308 participants was 74.8 ± 6.2. Of these, 151(49%) were female. In terms of social frailty, 143 (46.4%) of the participants were robust, 105 (34.1%) were prefrail, and 60 (19.5%) were frail. Social frailty was less common in women, married individuals and those who exercised at least 1–2 days a week for 30 minutes. Intra-rater and inter-rater concordance were found to be perfect with Kappa values of 0.90 (p:<0.001) and 0.85 (p:<0.001), respectively. The SFS had statistically significant correlations with geriatric assessment tests. DISCUSSION The Five-Item Social Frailty Scale is a reliable and valid tool for assessing social frailty in the Turkish population.