Perceived Accessibility of Living Environment and Services Questionnaire: Validity and Reliability.

The people tested were recruited by convenience, largely through social media, so they skew toward older adults with digital literacy; those who are not online are barely represented. Most of the 495 people used to check construct validity (79.4%) reported no functional disability, and the author calls for testing in people with disabilities and different diagnoses. The test-retest group was 30 of the researcher's colleagues and acquaintances rather than patients, so how repeatable the scores are in a clinic population is unknown. Answers are yes/no, so a route that is partly accessible cannot be told apart from one that is not accessible at all. The questionnaire does not ask about the presence or frequency of public transport or how people get to friends' houses, and the author recommends adding these. Several items flag things that are difficult to change, such as flat versus steep terrain or the number of stairs. All the data come from one country, Israel, and the construct-validity data were originally collected for a different study rather than for this one.

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest. The work was sponsored by the Foundation for Older Adult's Research at Ariel University.

Do not read the close agreement with the researchers' ratings as proof the PALES measures accessibility objectively. The people scoring it alongside participants were the researcher and assistants who already knew each participant's living environment, so the two sets of scores were not independent. The questionnaire records what a person perceives about their surroundings, not what is physically there.