Abstract
BackgroundGeneric quality of life (QoL) instruments provide important measures of self-reported wellbeing that can be compared across healthy and clinical populations. The aim of this analysis is to validate the ten-item QoL instrument “QOL10”, as well as to confirm the validity of the embedded “QOL5” questionnaire and single-item “QOL1” in measuring overall QoL among adults in a substance use disorder treatment study.MethodsWe used exploratory factor analysis and measured internal and convergent validity of the QOL10 against the gold standard measure of the WHOQOL-BREF, in a subsample of 107 participants in a substance use disorder treatment study.ResultsThe QOL10 displayed internal and convergent validity to the gold standard measure. Factor analysis revealed a two-factor structure that can be interpreted as “social QoL”, containing items about relationships and social functioning, and “global QoL”, comprised of items about health, working ability, self-evaluation, and an overall QoL estimation.ConclusionsThe QOL10 provides clinically useful and valid measures of social-related QoL and global QoL via two subscales. Interestingly, the QOL10’s social QoL measure, from the current sample, had little relationship to the analyzed groups previously reported to have differential global QoL: social QoL appears to be not only conceptually distinct from global QoL, but also to be less influenced by typical substance- and treatment-specific factors.
Highlights
Generic quality of life (QoL) instruments provide important measures of self-reported wellbeing that can be compared across healthy and clinical populations
Validating a QoL instrument among the substance use disorder (SUD) population exposes the problem of a paucity of known groups, that is, few subgroups which consistently report differential QoL and can be used to test the sensitivity
We present the four domain scores as well as the single item measuring overall QoL; the second single-item question measuring self-reported health was not considered relevant to this analysis and is not presented
Summary
Generic quality of life (QoL) instruments provide important measures of self-reported wellbeing that can be compared across healthy and clinical populations. The aim of this analysis is to validate the ten-item QoL instrument “QOL10”, as well as to confirm the validity of the embedded “QOL5” questionnaire and single-item “QOL1” in measuring overall QoL among adults in a substance use disorder treatment study. Research with the SUD population, often focuses exclusively on health-related QoL [4, 5] This is despite qualitative findings that patients conceptualize QoL to be more about social inclusion and support than health [2, 6] and that SUD patients report worse social functioning than other chronic disease groups [7].
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