Construction and validation of the short form of social health questionnaire in Iran (SHQ16)

Introduction: Social health, as one of the key dimensions of health, plays an important role in the comfort of individuals and society.Research in this field requires tools that are suitable for Iranian society and have appropriate validity and reliability.This research was done with the aim of creating and validating the short form of the social health questionnaire.Method: The data for this study comes from a national conducted across 31 provinces.The sample size consisted of 60,853 individuals.The sampling method employed a multi-stage cluster approach, where three cities were selected from each province based on the age and gender composition of the participants.The initial pool of items, consisting of 40 design items, was derived from previous studies.Expert approval established content validity, and data analysis was performed using SPSS software and exploratory factor analysis (EFA).Findings: Following exploratory factor analysis, 16 items remained in the model.These items loaded onto four factors: social responsibility, social trust, political participation, and organizational support.Collectively, these four factors explain 69.38% of the variance in the overall structure.Furthermore, the internal consistency of the questionnaire was confirmed with a Cronbach's alpha coefficient of 0.88.Discussion: Given the large and diverse participant pool, national implementation, favorable validity and reliability results, alignment with Iranian culture, and an appropriate number of questions compared to previous questionnaires, this tool is well-suited for measuring social health at the individual level.