Development and Psychometric Evaluation of a Socioeconomic Status Questionnaire for Urban Households (SESIran): The Preliminary Version

Abstract

Background: The aim of present study was to develop and validate an appropriate socioeconomic status (SES) assessment questionnaire to be used through health studies in Iranian urban households. Methods: The study was conducted through a mixed method study design in Tabriz, northwest of Iran in 2014. It was conducted in several stages including: development of initial version, qualitative study, feasibility evaluation, and assessment of the validity as well as the reliability. The internal consistency, test-retest reliability, content validity, concurrent validity and construct validity were assessed. Results: With respect to the assessment of construct validity, 5 domains (factors) were extracted including: main factor (alpha=0.84), self-evaluation of expenditure capacity (alpha=0.96), wealth (alpha=0.70), home and furniture (alpha=0.66) and costs related to health (alpha=0.55). Intraclass correlation coefficient was above 0.6 for all factors except for wealth domain. Conclusion: The questionnaire developed appeared to be a valid and reliable SES assessment tool It may be of value to be used not only as a complementary questionnaire in most health surveys or clinical studies, but also as a main questionnaire in health equity and health economics research.