A psychometric evaluation of Professional Quality of Life Scale Version 5 (ProQOL 5) in a UK-based sample of allied mental health professionals

Abstract

AbstractThe Professional Quality of Life Scale Version 5 (ProQOL 5; Stamm, 2010) is often used to assess burnout, secondary traumatic stress, and compassion satisfaction in allied mental health professionals in the UK. However, vital empirical evidence assessing psychometric properties of this instrument for this occupational group or in this national context does not exist. Therefore, the aim of the present study was to conduct a confirmatory factor analysis to validate ProQOL 5 in a sample of 366 UK-based clinical psychologists, counsellors, and psychotherapists recruited via online purposive sampling. The findings indicated that in alignment with existing research, the original three-factor structure demonstrated poor fit to data. Thus, the structure was investigated further with a novel technique in network psychometrics called bootstrapped exploratory graph analysis (bootEGA). The results indicated that 21 items from the original 30-item ProQOL 5 demonstrated satisfactory levels of item stability, i.e., all items were replicated in more than 80% of bootstrapped samples. The present study is the first to evaluate the internal structure of ProQOL 5 in a sample of mental health professionals based in the UK.