The Short Form Health Survey (SF-36): translation and validation study in Afghanistan

Quality of life is defined as the subjective perception of one's own well-being within a sociocultural context. SF-36 is commonly used to check the health status of the general population in many countries.

To validate the Persian (Dari) version of the Short Form Health Survey (SF-36) in Herat.

The Persian (Dari) version of SF-36 was culturally adapted. A total of 1259 healthy individuals aged ≥ 18 years participated in the study between November 2016 and April 2017. Construct validity of SF-36 was evaluated through exploratory factor analysis. The extraction was performed by principal component analysis from the polychoric correlation matrix estimated by a 2-step method with varimax rotation. Internal consistency and test-retest reliability were assessed by Cronbach's α SPSS version 23.0 and R version 3.1.3 were used in the analysis.

The last version of SF-36 including 27 items in 8 factors explained 86.48% of the variance. The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin value was 0.391 and Bartlett's test showed statistical significance (P < 0.001). Confirmatory factor analysis revealed that the final model demonstrated good fit statistics (P < 0.001), root mean square error of approximation=0.056, goodness-of-fit index=0.963, and adjusted goodness-of-fit index=0.953). Cronbach's α for the 8 subscales was 0.753-0.933. All subscales of SF-36 had good internal consistency reliability and good test-retest reliability.

We showed that our Dari version of SF-36 is suitable to evaluate quality of life in adults in Herat City. This scale will be useful for health researchers in the future.