Applicability of health promoting lifestyle profile-II for postmenopausal women in Sri Lanka; a validation study

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: Health Promoting Lifestyle Profile-II (HPLP-II), developed in the West, evaluates 52 health promoting behaviors (HPB) under six subscales. In this study we evaluated the applicability of HPLP-II to assess the HPB of postmenopausal women (PMW) conversant in the Sinhala language in Sri Lanka. METHODS: The Sinhala version of HPLP-II was adapted following standard methodology of cross cultural adaptation. It included forward and backward translations, review by an expert group, focus group discussion and pre-testing. It was self-administered among randomly selected healthy, Sinhalese, community-dwelling PMW (n = 245, aged 55.9 ± 3.4 years), along with the Short Form 36 (SF-36) survey. The Sinhala version of HPLP-II was re-administered among a subsample (n = 105) after two weeks of first administration. Psychometric properties - reliability and validity, were evaluated. RESULTS: In the Sinhala version of HPLP-II, both internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha = 0.98) and test-retest reliability (intra class correlation / ICC = 0.98, 95%CI = 0.97–0.99) were high. Structural validity assessment with Factor analysis using Principal Component Analysis extracted seven factors explaining 80.65% cumulative variance with few exceptions from the original version. Health responsibility (HR) and spiritual growth (SG) subscales of HPLP-II and physical and psychological health dimensions scores of SF-36 scores correlated significantly (r > 0.63, p < 0.001) ensuring strong concurrent validity. CONCLUSIONS: The Sinhala version of HPLP-II adapted by us is a tool with high reliability and validity.