2017 Volume 18 Issue 3 Pages 133-140
This study aimed to develop a Patient-Reported Quality of Life scale to measure perceived quality of life outcomes brought about by nursing interventions.
To obtain the data necessary to develop the scale, we recruited subjects from patients who had been hospitalized for two days or longer, and were prepared to be discharged on a set date. Questionnaires were distributed to 1,225 patients, and 1,193 responses were obtained. For statistical analyses, we used the data of 820 patients who responded to all of the survey items. In reference to previous studies, we prepared the NQOL scale items：4 items for the domain of “Health,” 7 items for the domain of “Life,” and 4 items for the domain of “Existence.” We performed exploratory factor analysis (EFA) to assess content validity and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to examine construct validity. To assess the reliability of the scale, we examined the internal consistency using the reliability coefficient omega. Before evaluating the validity and reliability of the scale, polychoric correlation coefficients were calculated to omit redundant items. Next, we performed EFA to eliminate all the items with loadings of 0.30 or higher on multiple factors, and interpreted the factors. The fit of the extracted model to the data was examined through CFA based on structural equation modeling.
Results indicated that the three-second-order-factor model comprising 2 items for “Health,” 4 items for “Life” and 2 items for “Existence” as first-order factors and NQOL as second-order factor had adequate fit. The reliability coefficient omega was also within a statistically appropriate range.
In the Discussion section, we evaluated the construct validity of the NQOL scale through cross validation and discussed the need to elucidate factors that can influence NQOL.
