Adaptation of the Lawton Instrumental Activities of Daily Living Scale to Turkish: Validity and Reliability Study

BACKGROUND: The Lawton Instrumental Activities of Daily Living (IADL) scale is the most widely used scale for the assessment of IADL in the elderly population. The aim of this study was to adapt the Lawton IADL Scale in Turkish and to investigate the validity and the reliability of the scale in older adults. METHODS: A total of 80 participants with a mean age of 71.6±5.8 years were included in the study. The independent living skills of the older adults were measured using Lawton IADL, Hodkinson Mental Test, Functional Independence Scale, Barthel Index, Katz Index, and visual analog scale. Lawton IADL was translated into Turkish, validated by professional reviewers, translated back into English, and then tested. Cronbach’s alpha was used to measure reliability in a group of 34 participants and test-retest was performed 1 week after the first test. Pearson correlation analysis was used to show the relationship between Lawton IADL and other scales and indexes. RESULTS: Internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha) value was 0.843 for the whole scale. The intraclass correlation coefficient value of the scale was 0.915. CONCLUSION: These results confirm that the Turkish version of the Lawton IADL scale has excellent reliability and validity.