The term quality of life is also used by politicians and economists to measure the livability of a given city or nation. Two widely known measures of livability are the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Where-to-be-born Index and Mercer’s Quality of Living Reports. These two measures calculate the livability of countries and cities around the world, respectively, through a combination of subjective life-satisfaction surveys and objective determinants of quality of life such as divorce rates, safety, and infrastructure. Such measures relate more broadly to the population of a city, state, or country, not to individual quality of life.

QoL differs from the former in that standard of living is largely based on economic status and income. Third, the criteria used were developed in 1994, and one may question whether these remain relevant in 2018. However, the criteria were refined by Moons in 2004 and, to our knowledge, no other criteria for assessing the conceptual rigor in QOL studies have been published. The investigators used the Karnofsky Performance Status and FLIC in a randomized trial of two programs for patients with advanced metastatic non-small cell lung cancer. A majority of patients had difficulty completing the FLIC; the investigators were unable to examine the effect of treatment on quality of life because of problems in the administration of the form.

Indeed, the disease-specific approach has been advocated in the study of arthritis, heart disease, and the evaluation of chemotherapy. Sixty-one (38%) of the included studies had an experimental design involving either a randomized controlled trial (RCT) design or a quasi-experimental design. Fifty studies had a cross-sectional or descriptive design, and 37 had a cohort or longitudinal design. Six of the studies had a case-control design, seven studies were methodological or validation studies, one study had a qualitative design, and one study had a mixed-methods design (Table 2). Of the included studies, 60 were from Europe and had been conducted in 17 different European countries.

Ratings and Utilities

QOL research has been criticized for a lack of conceptual clarity and clear definition of QOL 8, 15–17. In this snapshot review, most articles had a low-quality score according to the criteria of Gill and Feinstein 5, 8. Surprisingly, only 13% of the articles provided a definition of the concept of QOL. This is lower than that reported in the survey of Bratt and Moons 7, which found that 27% of the studies of congenital health disease from 2005 to 2014 provided a definition of QOL. A definition of QOL should state clearly what the authors mean by QOL and how it is related to other concepts 18. The criteria fulfilled most frequently in our study were stating the domains of QOL to be measured, giving a reason for choosing the instruments used, and aggregating the results from multiple items.

Review Form for Life Situation Survey

1. In their reviews, these authors discuss the reliability and validity of a number of the measures and their uses in health care studies.
2. This can be achieved only if patient views are incorporated into treatment evaluations, thereby ensuring that health and medical care are fully evidence-based.
3. Their use in assessing the outcome of health care interventions has become popular.
4. Forty-three of the 46 patients administered the initial FLIC completed at least 90 percent of the questions.
5. To choose measures for assessing quality of life, researchers need to address seven issues, briefly reviewed below.

Stated another way, if the items are adequately sampled from the domain of quality of life, the sum of the responses should give a better indication of the quality of life of the individual than the response to any one item. quality of life definition A low coefficient alpha would indicate that the items did not come from the same conceptual domain or that the noise in the items was substantial. There is a problem with repeated self-assessment during the course of therapy. Investigators have found it difficult to maintain high self-assessment completion rates over several weeks (Finkelstein et al. 1988, Raghavan et al. 1988) and were not able to use the assessments because of missing values. Levine et al. (1988) minimized the problem by having nurses interview the patients during clinic visits; this procedure, however, added considerably to the time and costs of the study. If these measures are to be used repeatedly, the time and costs of maintaining high response rates over multiple assessments must be considered.

Three Sources of Descriptive Information for Quality-of-Life Measures

Please note that the translations available via the links opposite (WHOQOL-BREF / WHOQOL-100) were not created by the World Health Organization (WHO). In the event of any inconsistency between the English and the translated version, then the original English versions (in the Publications section below) shall be the binding and authentic versions. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single entry from a reference work in OR for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). The KPS correlated highly (0.84) with the Quality of Well-Being Scale (Kaplan and Bush 1982) and moderately (0.68) with the self-report Health Perception Questionnaire (Ware 1976, Grieco and Long 1984). Such policies refuse to tolerate even minor crimes; proponents argue that this will improve the quality of life of local residents.

Alternatively, the items on one form can be split into two groups, and coefficients can be computed for each half and compared. Subjective measures provide opportunities for individuals to express their thoughts, knowledge, attitudes, moods, and feelings. Subjective phenomena may be related to particular diseases or types of therapy, or they may be more global.