The development and testing of an instrument to measure successful aging

This article reports the development and testing of the Successful Aging Inventory (SAI). Two hundred participants completed two versions of the SAI, a Likert format and dichotomous format. To test the validity of the SAI, participants also completed the Life Satisfaction Inventory-A, Purpose in Life Test, Mastery Scale, and the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale. Both versions of the SAI had acceptable psychometric properties. Principal components analysis resulted in five factors for the Likert version, accounting for 62.19% of the variance. The SAI shows promise as a measure of successful aging and also has the potential to be a useful method of tracking older adults' overall progress and improvements in response to health promotion strategies. The next step is to evaluate its sensitivity and appropriateness for use with ethnic and racial minority older adults, and those with more varied health status.