Development of Life-Worldly Communication Scale for Older Persons: A Pilot Study

Objectives: Our prior study revealed that the speech duration of older people in long-term care facilities in Japan is four minutes in one day, owing to the lack of “life-worldly communications.” This study is a pilot study for the development and validation of the Life-Worldly Communication Scale (LWCS) that can efficiently measure the life-worldly communication duration of older people. Methods: The subjects were 65 individuals, 65 years of age or older, who were chosen among people living in long-term care facilities and in home care in Japan. The items of LWCS were generated from related literature. The content validity of LWCS was examined from the content validity ratio. Construct validity of LWCS was verified by exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. Convergent or discriminant validity was examined from the relation between LWCS and the life-worldly communication time or depression level. Reliability was examined by inspecting internal consistency and stability. Results: The LWCS proved satisfactory in the goodness-of-fit index (GFI = .92, NFI = .91, CFI = .99, RMSEA =.03) by confirmatory factor analysis. Convergent validity of LWCS was supported by a significant correlation between LWCS and the life-worldly communication time (r = .62, P