Development and Validation of the Life Skills Scale for Older adults

The purpose of this research is the construct of life skills for older adults was established after the overall perception of life skills required in the daily life of older adults were explored, and then life skills necessary in late life was presented as an integrated model through a complex dimension of physical, psychological, and social aspects. After establishing the construct, a tool for measuring life skills for older adults was ultimately developed. In-depth interviews were conducted with 17 older adults aged between 65~84 to understand their experiences and perceptions regarding life skills for older adults. Also, an open-ended survey was conducted on 91 older adults participants to gather various opinions. Through inductive analysis, the construct of life skills for older adults was established with five factors: physical activity performance skills, daily self-efficacy skills, adaptation and acceptance skills, participation skills in social activities, and engagement skills in digital society. Preliminary questions were developed based on the details and construct of life skills for older adults established, of which 35 questions of 5 factors were selected through evaluating content validity. The goodness-of-it of the items and the possibility of using factor analysis were confirmed through data collected in the survey. 23 questions of 5 factors were finally determined to measure the life skills for older adults through confirmatory factor analysis. Convergent validity and discriminant validity were checked to verify that the final 23 questions accurately measured the variable’s construct. Concurrent validity, cross validity, the equivalence between groups based on gender were additionally checked to confirm validity. The life skills scale for older adults developed through this study is a tool which evaluates the level of life skills for older adults in the physical, psychological, and social aspects. It not only provides useful information in predicting increase in quality of life in late life, but also can be used in future studies which focus on researching relations between variables regarding psychosocial factors of older adults.