New Questionnaire Captures How Older Adults Really Experience Daily Life

What does it actually mean to age well? For a growing number of researchers, the answer lies not in the absence of disease but in something far more ordinary: whether older people are genuinely taking part in the activities that fill a human life. A new study published in BMC Geriatrics by Haya Fogel-Grinvald, Adina Maeir and Anat Golos of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem puts that idea to a rigorous test. The team validated the Experiencing Day-to-Day Life Questionnaire, known as the EDLQ-old, a tool designed to measure how community-dwelling adults aged 65 and older engage with the routines, hobbies and social interactions that shape their everyday existence. With global life expectancy rising steadily and the population of older adults expanding at an unprecedented pace, the need for reliable ways to assess healthy aging has never been more pressing, and this study offers a carefully tested instrument to meet it.

The conceptual foundation of the questionnaire rests on a distinction that has become central to gerontological research: the difference between objective and subjective participation. Objective participation refers to what a person actually does, how often they engage in particular activities, and how frequently those activities appear in their weekly routine. Subjective participation, by contrast, captures the inner experience of doing, how satisfied a person feels with their level of engagement, how important those activities are to their sense of identity, and how competent they believe themselves to be while performing them. Two people may attend a weekly chess club with identical regularity, yet one may feel deeply fulfilled while the other feels merely present. The EDLQ-old was built to capture both sides of that divide, and the validation study was designed to determine whether its structure and scores hold up under statistical scrutiny.

The instrument itself asks respondents about their engagement across seven categories of activity that prior research has linked to physical and mental health in later life. For each category, participants rate their experience on four separate scales: frequency, satisfaction, importance and competence. This design reflects a broader shift in the field, informed by frameworks such as the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health, which treats participation as a central outcome of health rather than a peripheral one. Existing instruments, including the Activity Card Sort, the Meaningful Activity Participation Assessment, the Engagement in Meaningful Activities Survey and the Do-Live-Well framework, have each contributed to this landscape, but the developers of the EDLQ-old sought a measure that would combine breadth of activity coverage with a systematic assessment of the subjective quality of engagement in a single questionnaire.

To test the tool, the researchers recruited 502 community-dwelling older adults in Israel between July 2021 and February 2023, using convenience sampling. The mean age of the sample was 75.07 years, with a standard deviation of 7.90, meaning the cohort spanned a wide swath of later life, from the newly retired to the oldest old. All participants lived in the community rather than in institutional settings, which is precisely the population that healthy-aging policy aims to support. The study received ethics approval from the Hebrew University’s committee for research involving human subjects and was conducted according to the Declaration of Helsinki, with written informed consent obtained from every participant. Funding came from the Israel National Institute for Health Policy Research and the Minerva Center on Intersectionality in Aging.

The first psychometric property the team examined was internal consistency, the degree to which items within each scale measure the same underlying construct. The results were strong across the board. Cronbach’s alpha and McDonald’s omega, two complementary statistical coefficients that estimate reliability from slightly different angles, ranged from 0.705 to 0.830 across the questionnaire’s scales. In the conventional language of psychometrics, values above 0.70 are considered acceptable and values approaching 0.90 are excellent, so the EDLQ-old landed squarely in the territory where researchers and clinicians can trust that the scores are not dominated by random measurement error. This matters because a questionnaire that produces unstable readings cannot detect meaningful change, whether that change reflects decline following an illness or improvement after a rehabilitation program.

Next came construct validity, tested through confirmatory factor analysis, a statistical technique that evaluates whether the pattern of correlations among items matches a theorized structure. The researchers hypothesized a four-factor structure corresponding to the four scales, with frequency representing the objective dimension of participation and satisfaction, importance and competence representing its subjective dimensions. The data supported this model with an acceptable goodness of fit. The chi-square statistic was 658.463 with 303 degrees of freedom, and the fit indices told a consistent story: the Comparative Fit Index reached 0.954 and the Tucker-Lewis Index 0.942, both above the 0.95 and 0.90 thresholds commonly used to indicate good fit, while the Standardized Root Mean Square Residual was 0.048 and the Root-Mean-Square Error of Approximation was 0.048, both comfortably below the 0.08 cutoff for acceptable error. In practical terms, the questionnaire measures four distinct but related dimensions of participation in the way its designers intended.

The study also examined known-groups validity, which asks whether a measure distinguishes between groups that theory says should differ. Here the EDLQ-old performed as expected: older adults without long-term health problems scored significantly higher on activity frequency, satisfaction and competence than their peers living with chronic conditions. This finding carries real clinical weight. It suggests that the questionnaire is sensitive to the ways in which long-term health problems reshape daily life, not merely in terms of what people stop doing, but in how capable and satisfied they feel while doing what remains. A screening or assessment tool that can flag this erosion of engagement early could give clinicians and policymakers a window for intervention before isolation and inactivity compound existing health burdens.

Convergent validity provided the final pillar of evidence. If the EDLQ-old truly measures participation, its scores should correlate with other established measures of related constructs. The researchers computed Pearson’s correlations between the EDLQ-old and the World Health Organization Quality of Life questionnaire, abbreviated WHOQoL, and between the EDLQ-old and the Engagement in Meaningful Activities Survey. The correlations with quality of life ranged from 0.342 to 0.665 across the scales, while the correlations with meaningful activity engagement ranged from 0.480 to 0.558. All were positive and statistically significant. The pattern is exactly what one would hope for: strong enough to confirm that the questionnaire is tapping a genuinely related construct, yet not so high as to suggest it is merely a redundant duplicate of existing instruments. The moderate overlap with quality of life in particular supports the idea that participation is a distinct contributor to well-being rather than a simple proxy for it.

The implications of this validation extend well beyond the laboratory. Occupational therapists, geriatricians, rehabilitation specialists and public health planners all need instruments that can quantify participation in a way that is both scientifically defensible and practically meaningful. Because the EDLQ-old captures objective and subjective dimensions simultaneously, it can support a more nuanced conversation between clinician and patient. A person whose activity frequency remains high but whose satisfaction is slipping may need a very different intervention from someone whose engagement has collapsed across the board. The questionnaire’s structure makes such distinctions visible, and its demonstrated reliability means that changes over time can be interpreted with confidence. For researchers, it opens the door to studies linking participation profiles to downstream outcomes such as cognitive decline, depression, hospitalization and mortality.

There are, of course, boundaries to what any single study can establish. The sample was recruited through convenience sampling in one country, and the cross-sectional design captures a single moment in each participant’s life rather than tracking change over years. The authors published their work as an open-access article, and it appeared as a peer-reviewed, accepted manuscript carrying a permanent digital object identifier, 10.1186/s12877-026-08389-4, with the final version of record to follow. Even with those caveats, the study delivers what validation research is meant to deliver: coherent evidence that the EDLQ-old is a reliable and valid measure of participation among community-dwelling older adults. As societies worldwide grapple with the demographic realities of aging populations, tools like this one transform an abstract ideal, living fully in later life, into something that can be measured, monitored and ultimately protected.

Subject of Research: Validation of a questionnaire measuring objective and subjective participation in daily activities among community-dwelling older adults

Article Title: Validation of the Experiencing Day-to-Day Life Questionnaire (EDLQ-old): assessing objective and subjective participation of community-dwelling older adults

Article References: Fogel-Grinvald, H., Maeir, A., & Golos, A. (2026). Validation of the Experiencing Day-to-Day Life Questionnaire (EDLQ-old): assessing objective and subjective participation of community-dwelling older adults. BMC Geriatrics. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12877-026-08389-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s12877-026-08389-4

Keywords: healthy aging, participation, older adults, psychometrics, quality of life, questionnaire validation, geriatrics, confirmatory factor analysis, daily activities, reliability, construct validity, community-dwelling