To evaluate the sleep quality of elderly patients at a ClassⅢ Grade A hospital in Beijing with the Chinese version of Richards-Campbell Sleep Questionnaire (RCSQ) and to assess the reliability and validity of the questionnaire in elderly inpatients.

From October 2017 to July 2018, we selected 155 elderly inpatients at a Class Ⅲ Grade A hospital in Dalian of Liaoning Province by purposive sampling. All of the patients were investigated with the general information questionnaire and the Chinese version of RCSQ. We assessed the test-retest reliability in 30 patients with hospital stay more than one week. Reliability and validity of the questionnaire were tested by the internal consistency, test-retest reliability, split-half reliability and construct validity.

The Cronbach's α and split-half reliability of the total questionnaire were 0.898 and 0.837 respectively. The correlation coefficients between items and the total score ranged from 0.805 to 0.909 (P<0.01) . The item correlations of test-retest reliability ranged from 0.362 to 0.884 (P<0.05) with 0.671 for the correlation in total scores (P<0.05) . Exploratory factor analysis extracted one common factor with 71.541% for the cumulative variance contribution, 0.875 for the KMO value and 460.834 for the Bartlett value (P<0.01) . Confirmatory factor analysis showed that the model fitted well.

The Chinese version of RCSQ has good reliability and validity in assessing sleep quality for elderly inpatients which can be an instrument for sleep research or screening in this population.

Aged; Sleep; Richards-Campbell sleep questionnaire; Reliability; Validity; Inpatients