Development and Verification of a Model for Assessment of Risk Factors of Death in Floods

Background: Determination of the causes of flood-related deaths is the precondition for effective interventions aimed at the reduction of such deaths. There is a gap in the design and the development of a valid and reliable tool for measuring underlying factors of death in the flood.Methods: A complete set of causes of flood deaths was collected. After forming the pool of items, an initial questionnaire was designed and divided into two parts of objective and subjective factors. The questionnaire’s psychometric evaluation was performed for the subjective part.Results: At the design stage, the objective and subjective sections were designed. During the psychometric evaluation, the number of items was reduced. While measuring the content validity 13 questions were excluded. Finally, a 33-item questionnaire was developed in seven categories. In the confirmatory factor analysis, the KMO coefficient was higher than .05 for all constructs. The internal consistency of the instrument using Cronbach's alpha coefficient was 0.92. Finally, in order to perform the stability test, the Pearson correlation coefficient was calculated for all questions. This was above .05 and acceptable.Conclusions: FAFDQ can be used to make decisions, identify groups at risk of flood-related deaths, and implement flood-related death-reduction interventions. Indeed, these measures have led to the development of a comprehensive and reliable questionnaire for measuring the factors affecting flood deaths: a comprehensive set of factors that can be scientifically and accurately classified as flood-related deaths, appropriately categorizing the subjective and objective factors, psychometric assessment of the SFAFDQ, confirmatory factor analysis and questionnaire testing in a case-control Study.