Urdu Translation of Friendship Scale: Evidence for the Validity and Measurement Invariance Across Gender.

Social isolation is a state of nearly-absolute lack of interaction between an individual and society. The Friendship Scale (Hawthorne, 2006) is a measure of social isolation that needed to be translated in the Urdu language for its validation for the Pakistani population owing to its brevity and sound psychometric properties. For the Urdu translation, the standard back-translation procedure was adopted, and the cross-language validation of the translated version was undertaken on a purposive sample of (N = 60) older adults with a minimum age of 60 years. The test-retest reliability of one week for the Urdu-English and English-Urdu version was .95 and .97, respectively. In an independent purposive sample of older adults (N = 500; men = 263 and women = 237) from Lahore and Sargodha districts, the CFA of the Friendship Scale revealed a single factor solution with six indicators, which demonstrated configural, metric, and scalar invariance across both genders and comparable latent mean scores of men and women. The Friendship Scale demonstrated a significant positive relationship with depression and non-significant association with the assimilation, which provided evidence for the convergent and discriminant validities, respectively. Furthermore, evidence of the concurrent validity was established as the older adults whose spouses had died scored significantly higher on the Friendship scale as compared to their counterparts who were living with their spouses. These pieces of evidence suggest that the Urdu version of the Friendship scale is a reliable and valid measure of flourishing for both genders.