Development and content validation of an educational manual for promoting physical activity among older adults in...

To better address the increasing problem of physical inactivity among the elderly in India, we aimed to determine the attitudes of older adults toward physical activity and to create an educational resource that would encourage them to engage in physical activity. Thus, our goal was to develop an educational manual about physical activity tailored to the older adult population based upon their views about this topic. The manual was created over two separate stages. In the first stage, we evaluated the attitudes, facilitators, and barriers to physical activity among older adults through in-depth telephone interviews. Each of the 13 participants (five female and eight male), interviewed separately for 60 min, completed a semi-structured interview. Thematic analysis of the transcript of the interviews identified four superordinate themes: benefits of physical activity; perceived barriers; factors which motivate older adults to participate in physical activity; and domains of physical activity. These themes allowed us to tailor the manual to the specific needs of older adults, thereby providing us with valuable information from the perspective of older adults about physical activity. In the second stage of the study, we created a culturally congruent physical activity educational manual for use within the Indian population. We then performed content validation on the manual. For content validation, we used a panel of six experts and ten members of the target population to evaluate the relevance and effectiveness of the manual. All of the contents of the manual were ranked as relevant, with 100% relevance reported by the expert panel and 98% relevance reported by the target population. Independent I-CVIs > 0.79 (S-CVI/Ave = 79%) were calculated for each item, indicating that each item of the manual was relevant. An Flesch ease reading score of 80.9 was calculated for the manual, which indicates that it can be easily read by a sixth grade student. The current study provides a contribution to advances in science related to promoting health, by creating a validated, self-explaining, culturally-congruent physical activity educational manual for physically active older adults.