Abstract
BackgroundThe absence of culturally relevant measures in indigenous languages could pose a challenge to epidemiological studies on health-related quality of life (HRQoL) in developing nations.AimTo explore the feasibility and determine the validity and reliability of the Setswana translation of the HRQoL Short Form-8 (SF-8) among Setswana-speaking adults.SettingPotchefstroom in the North West province.MethodsSixty healthy men (n = 26) and women (n = 34), aged 45.5 ± 9.3 years, completed a Setswana translation of the SF-8 questionnaire and the original English version twice, with a 4-week interval between completions.ResultsThe Setswana SF-8 presented good concurrent validity with the Spearman’s correlation coefficients (ρ) of 0.72 for role physical to 0.91 for social functioning. The Cronbach’s alpha coefficients for the first and second measurements were 0.87 and 0.87, respectively, for the Setswana-translated SF-8 and 0.86 and 0.89 for the original English SF-8. The reliability coefficients were moderate for the mental health (ρ = 0.60), social functioning (ρ = 0.56) and role emotional (ρ = 0.50) domains, as well as the mental component summary (ρ = 0.50) and physical component summary (ρ = 0.45), but fair for the role physical (ρ = 0.43), body pain (ρ = 0.43), general health (ρ = 0.42), physical functioning (ρ = 0.41) and vitality (ρ = 0.38) domains on the translated Setswana version of the SF-8.ConclusionThe Setswana SF-8 version was feasible, acceptable and had acceptable concurrent validity and fair to moderate evidence of test–retest reliability for assessing HRQoL among adult Setswana-speaking community dwellers.
Highlights
Over the past 20 years, the interest in health-related quality of life (HRQoL) has increased because of the concept’s potential to facilitate meaningful improvements in health services and policy research (Ruževičius & Akranavičiūtė 2007)
The largest percentage of the participants (63%) earned less than 1000 rand every month, while 35% earned between 1000 and 5000 rand, and 1.7% more than 5000 rand per month, per household
More than half (58.3%) of the participants lived in a brick house, while 1.7% lived in a flat or apartment and the remaining 40% in an informal type of house
Summary
Over the past 20 years, the interest in health-related quality of life (HRQoL) has increased because of the concept’s potential to facilitate meaningful improvements in health services and policy research (Ruževičius & Akranavičiūtė 2007). The increase in interest has contributed to HRQoL being internationally accepted as a valid indicator of health status This global acceptance means that it has the potential to be a valuable mechanism to compare and aggregate results of efficacy and effectiveness studies across countries and groups. To facilitate such international comparison and aggregation, the concept needs to be meaningfully operationalised across different language and cultural groups. The personal attributes of understanding the meaning of life could help people look for a higher existential level of their life (Ruževičius & Akranavičiūtė 2007) This can be achieved by understanding the individual’s satisfaction with life dimensions compared to an ideal life, which depends on one’s value system (Ruževičius & Akranavičiūtė 2007). The absence of culturally relevant measures in indigenous languages could pose a challenge to epidemiological studies on health-related quality of life (HRQoL) in developing nations
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