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Reliability and Validity of the Older Americans Resources and Services (OARS) Social Resources Scale in Six European Countries

¹ Interdisciplinary Research Centre on Ageing, Swansea University, United Kingdom.
² Institute of Medical and Social Care Research, University of Wales, Bangor, United Kingdom.
³ Faculté des Lettres, des Sciences Humaines, des Arts et des Sciences de l'éducation, Université du Luxembourg, Luxembourg.
⁴ Department of Cognitive Science and Education, University of Trento, Italy.
⁵ Blekinge Institute of Technology, School of Health Science, Karlskrona, Sweden.
⁶ Amsterdam Institute for Metropolitan and International Development Studies, Universiteit van Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
⁷ Faculty of Psychology, Department of Clinical, Biological and Differential Psychology, University of Vienna, Austria.

Address correspondence to Vanessa Burholt, Interdisciplinary Research Centre on Ageing, School of Human Science, Swansea University, Singleton Park, Swansea, Wales, United Kingdom SA2 8PP. E-mail: v.burholt{at}swansea.ac.uk

Objectives. The purpose of this article is to examine data quality, reliability, and construct validity of the Older Americans Resources and Services social resources scale in six European countries (The Netherlands, Luxembourg, Italy, Austria, the United Kingdom, and Sweden).

Methods. A questionnaire was administered through face-to-face interviews in five countries, and postal interview in the sixth, to representative populations of adults aged 50 to 90 living independently (N = 12,478). This article examines missing values and distribution of items in the social resources scale, and consistency of skew and kurtosis across countries. We performed item–total correlations and ran confirmatory factor analyses to test a three-factor model obtained in previous U.S. and Spanish analyses. Cronbach's alpha determined the reliability of the factors.

Results. We observed a relatively large proportion of missing data for one item (have someone who would help you). All items correlated with a score equal to or greater than 0.20. Although the confirmatory factor analyses generally supported the acceptability of the three-factor structure in the European data, the reliability of two dimensions (dependability and affective) was unacceptably low.

Discussion. Differences across countries make it unlikely that researchers can develop a single social resources scale that would have item equivalence in multiple countries.