Cultural Issues in Using the SF-36 Health Survey in Asia: Results from Taiwan

Table 4 Factor Loadings of the 8 SF-36 scales using rotated principal components in Taiwan, Japan, Hong Kong and the US

	Rotated Principal Components ^a
	Physical					Mental
Scale	Expected	Taiwan	Japan	HK	US	Expected	Taiwan	Japan	HK	US
PF	●	0.80	0.75	0.78	0.85	○	0.09	0.17	-0.08	0.12
RP	●	0.80	0.86	0.63	0.81	○	0.19	0.19	0.34	0.27
BP	●	0.64	0.51	0.61	0.76	○	0.28	0.52	0.23	0.28
GH	◐	0.46	0.37	0.70	0.69	◐	0.56	0.66	0.10	0.37
VT	◐	0.16	0.21	0.48	0.47	◐	0.84	0.88	0.51	0.64
SF	◐	0.38	0.45	0.20	0.42	●	0.61	0.60	0.74	0.67
RE	○	0.30	0.69	0.05	0.17	●	0.54	0.34	0.74	0.78
MH	○	0.02	0.13	0.10	0.17	●	0.90	0.89	0.77	0.87

● Strong association (r ≥ .70) ◐ Moderate to substantial association (.30 < r < .70) ○ Weak association (r ≤ .30) ^a Correlations between each scale and rotated principal component. Source: Data for US is from Ware, J., Snow, K., Kosinski, M., & Gandek, B. (1993). SF-36 Health Survey: Manual & Interpretation Guide. MA: Boston: Nimrod Press. Data for Japan is from Fukuhara S, Ware JE, Kosinski M, Wada S, Gandek B (1998). Psychometric and Clinical Tests of Validity of the Japanese SF-36 Health Survey. J Clin Epidemiol, 51, 1998; 51: 1045–1053 Data for HK is from Lam, C. L., Gandek, B., Ren, X. S., & Chan, M. S. (1998). Tests of scaling assumptions and construct validity of the Chinese (HK) version of the SF-36 Health Survey. J Clin Epidemiol, 51, 1139–1147.

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