The quality of life of older individuals following the world health organization assessment criteria

Abstract

The aim of this study was to evaluate the psychometric qualities of the WHOQOL-BREF(PT) (the questionnaire developed by the World Health Organization Quality of Life Grpup for quality of life assessment), when applied to Portuguese elderly people residing in a community setting. The psychometric qualities were assessed by confirmatory factor analysis. A hierarchical second-order model and a third model were performed, and all three models presented similar and reasonable adjustment indexes. The data analysis showed that the construct failed only regarding discriminant validity because the correlations between the first-order factors were higher, associated with lower values of average variance extracted. The psychometric qualities found in the original translation/validation of the WHOQOL-BREF(PT) were compared with those found in this study; this study found higher correlations between domains but a similar level of factor reliability. The findings of this study lead to three recommendations: (i) to compute each factor score for each participant using the factor score weights obtained from confirmatory analysis models instead of adopting a unitary weight for each item, as proposed by the authors of the original translation/validation of the WHOQOL-BREF(PT); (ii) to compute a QOL score, which is not included in the original translation/validation; and (iii) to analyze differences between individual scores for each participants, which should be done by a group of health experts.