Ageing is an increasing phenomenon all over the world, especially in Europe. The Portuguese INE (2002) confirms this trend for Portugal where local authorities play a crucial political and cultural role in promoting the quality of life of their citizens. In this paper we describe the validation process of a reliable and simple instrument fitted to assess the perceived quality of elderly people about the physical activity programs across the district municipalities. Besides a systematic literature review on inquiring services' quality we present the statistical procedure that allowed us to classify the explanation power of several quality dimensions. The results came out from a questionnaire applied to a sample of 210 elderly (0.5% of the Portuguese population) and demonstrate that the factors related to the "Variety" and "Human Resources" dimensions are strong and those related to "General Aspects" dimension are weak.
Physical Activity; Perceived Quality; Instrument; Elderly; Services
