Translation and validation of the Taiwanese SarQoL, a quality of life questionnaire specific to sarcopenia

Background: The Sarcopenia Quality of Life (SarQoL) questionnaire has been translated into various languages. This study validated the Taiwanese version of the SarQoL (SarQoL-TW) questionnaire. Methods: Forward-backward translation was conducted, along with a test of the prefinal version of the translated questionnaire. To validate the psychometric properties of the ques-tionnaire, 50 older adults with sarcopenia and 50 older adults without sarcopenia completed the SarQoL-TW, the Short Form12 Health Survey (SF-12), and the EQ-5D-3L questionnaire. Par-ticipants with sarcopenia were asked to complete the SarQoL-TW questionnaire once more af-ter 2 weeks. Validating the psychometric properties of the SarQoL-TW questionnaire involved assessing its discriminative power, internal consistency, construct validity, test-retest reli-ability, and potential floor and ceiling effects.Results: The SarQoL-TW questionnaire was translated without major difficulties. The psychomet-ric analysis revealed that older adults with sarcopenia scored significantly lower on the SarQoL-TW, both overall and in some of the domains. The Cronbach's alpha of 0.846 indicated high inter -nal consistency. The SarQoL-TW questionnaire correlated well with similar constructs on the SF-12 and EQ-5D-3L for convergent validity and correlated weakly with distinct domains for divergent validity, confirming its favorable construct validity. The test-retest reliability was excellent (in-traclass correlation coefficient: 0.970). Neither floor nor ceiling effects were observed.

Automated summary

This study validated the Taiwanese version of the SarQoL questionnaire and confirmed its linguistic and psychometric properties through translation and testing. The results showed that older adults with sarcopenia scored significantly lower on the SarQoL-TW questionnaire, and the questionnaire demonstrated high internal consistency and excellent test-retest reliability.