Cross-cultural adaptation and psychometric property testing of the Taiwan Chinese version of the iconographical falls efficacy scale.

BACKGROUND: The Iconographical Falls Efficacy Scale (Icon-FES) uses short phrases and images to depict activities. This study culturally adapted and validated the Taiwan Chinese version of the 30- and 10-item Icon-FESs (Icon-FESs [TW]) in community-dwelling older individuals. METHODS: The Icon-FES (TW) was developed using forward-backward translation. A total of 120 community-dwelling older individuals were recruited. They completed the Taiwan Chinese version of the Falls Efficacy Scale-International (FES-I [TC]), the Icon-FES (TW), the Mini-Mental State Examination, and the World Health Organization Quality of Life Questionnaire Brief Version (WHOQOL-BREF) and were assessed using the Berg Balance Scale and the Short Physical Performance Battery (SPPB). The Icon-FES (TW) was recompleted 1 week later. Confirmatory factor analysis was used to evaluate the overall structure and measurement properties. RESULTS: Cronbach's alpha values of 0.97 and 0.91 indicated that the 30- and 10-item Icon-FESs (TW) had high internal consistency. The 30- and 10-item Icon-FESs (TW) exhibited significantly high correlation with the FES-I (r = 0.88 and 0.84, respectively). Both versions of the Icon-FES (TW) exhibited mild correlation with the physical domain of the WHOQOL-BREF. The 30- and 10-item Icon-FESs (TW) discriminated by intensity of concern and SPPB score. Their test-retest reliability was high (intraclass correlation coefficient = 0.79 and 0.80 for the 30- and 10-item Icon-FESs (TW), respectively). Neither floor nor ceiling effects were observed. CONCLUSION: The Icon-FES (TW) is a reliable and valid questionnaire useful for assessing the levels of concern regarding falling among older adults in clinical practice and research.

Optimizing surface morphologies for ceramic films prepared using a magnetron sputtering.

This article presents the application of the response surface methodology for yielding the optimal conditions and for developing robust surface morphologies of zirconium nitride (ZrN) films. In this research, the ZrN films with (Ti, Cr) interfaces ((Ti, Cr)ZrN) were prepared by an unbalanced magnetron (UBM) sputtering. Two kinds of zirconium nitride films, with and without Ti additives, were reported. An orthogonal array for reducing the large number of experiments was introduced. The significant parameters from an analysis of variance for the (Ti, Cr)ZrN films were clearly observed. Furthermore, a quadric model was constructed efficiently. The predicted values and experimental results were close, which confirmed that the quadric model can be effectively used to predict the surface morphologies of the (Ti, Cr)ZrN films in the UBM sputtering. The experimental results were consistent with the response surface predictions. Therefore, it was concluded that the surface morphologies on multilayered films can be accurately predicted by response surface analysis, thereby justifying the reliability and feasibility of the approach.