Big Tobacco, Big Food, Big Alcohol "Lifestyle Diseases"

Adaptation and Validation of the Individual Lifestyle Profile Scale of Portuguese Older Adults Living at Home

(1) Background: Unadjusted lifestyles have been the main cause of risk for the loss of years of healthy life. However, currently valid and reliable instruments to assess the lifestyles of the elderly are quite long and difficult to interpret. For this reason, the objective of this study was to adapt and validate the 'Individual Lifestyle Profile' (ILP) scale in a sample of elderly people; (2) Methods: A methodological study was carried out and a sample of 300 older adults enrolled in a Health Unit located in the North of Portugal was used, who responded to the scale. We examined internal consistency, predictive validity, and discriminative ability; (3) Results: After the Exploratory Factorial analysis, a solution was found with four factors that explain a variance of 67.8%. The designation of the factors was changed from the original scale, with the exception of one dimension, and they were called Health Self-management, Social Participation and Group Interaction, Citizenship and Physical Activity. The total internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha) was 0.858, ranging from 0.666 to 0.860 in the mentioned factors; (4) Conclusions: The ILP scale proved to be easy to apply and presented a good reliability and validity index, based on internal consistency, AFE and AFC. The scale allows evaluating the lifestyle of older adults, and its use will be aimed at modifying behaviors associated with negative lifestyles of older adults and their individual needs.