Development and Psychometric Evaluation of a Socioeconomic Status Questionnaire for Urban Households (SESIran): The Primary Version

Background: The aim of present study was to develop and validate an appropriate socioeconomic status (SES) assessment questionnaire to be used through health studies in Iranian urban households.
Methods: The study was conducted through a mixed method study design in Tabriz, northwest of Iran in 2014. It was conducted in several stages including: development of initial version, qualitative study, feasibility evaluation, and assessment of the validity as well as the reliability. The internal con­sistency, test-retest reliability, content validity, concurrent validity and construct validity were assessed.
Results: With respect to the assessment of construct validity, 5 domains (factors) were extracted includ­ing: main factor (α=0.84), self-evaluation of expenditure capacity (α=0.96), wealth (α=0.70), home and furniture (α=0.66) and costs related to health (α=0.55). Intraclass correlation coefficient was above 0.6 for all factors except for wealth domain.
Conclusion: The questionnaire developed appeared to be a valid and reliable SES assessment tool. It may be of value to be used not only as a complementary questionnaire in most health surveys or clini­cal studies, but also as a main questionnaire in health equity and health economics research.