Psychometrics of Persian Version of the 11 items De Jong Gierveld Loneliness Scale among an Iranian Older Adults Population during COVID-19 Pandemic

Background: Due to the urgent emphasis on quarantine during the COVID-19 pandemic, the possibility of feelings of loneliness, especially in older adults, became an important nursing priority. Therefore, is important to identify loneliness quickly and respond appropriately to prevent, reduce or treat it. In order to do so, the aim of this study was to translate and evaluated the Persian version of De Jong Gierveld Loneliness Scale for older adults. Method: The original scale was translated into Persian using the World Health Organization protocol of forward-backward translation technique. Face validity and content validity; followed by EFA and CFA. The sample was 400 olddr adults including who were recruited via online data gathering. Lastly, reliability was assessed through the Average Inter-Item Correlation (AIC), Cronbach’s alpha and McDonald’s omega. Results: : The results showed that Persian version of Loneliness Scale had two factors namely social loneliness (5 items) and emotional loneliness (3 items) and the combined score explained 45.66% of the total variance of this scale. In addition, all goodness of fit indices confirmed a two factors model fit and all of the reliability indices were excellent. Conclusion: The Persian version of the Loneliness Scale is useful and suitable for detecting social loneliness and emotional loneliness in older adults during the COVID-19 pandemic.