Validation of quality of life questionnaire for patients with cancer - Indian scenario

BACKGROUND: Quality of Life (QOL) is an important health outcome measure in oncology. Given the underlying pressure of individual geo-political entities, a universal solution may not be applicable and hence there is a need to develop a regional tool and standardize the same to address the linguistic and socio-cultural factors.
OBJECTIVE: To standardize a tool to assess the QOL of patients with cancer to suit the Indian scenario.
Materials and METHODS: The samples were collected from the Cancer Institute (WIA), Chennai. Samples comprise of 400 patients with all sites and stages of cancer. Period: January 2001 to January 2002. Patients were in the age range of 41-60 years. Thirty-eight items were pooled from existing tools, reviews, and the field trial, by which face and factorial validity were established. Reliability of the tool was also tested. Correlation analysis was done to find out the relation between the domains of QOL.
Statistics used: Principal component method with varimax rotation was used. Spearmen product moment correlation and Cronbach alpha coefficient were used for reliability analysis.
RESULTS: Ten factors emerged with Eigen values ranging from 8.55 to 1.10 and accounted for 62.6% of variance. The first factor contributed maximally, 22% of variance. The remaining nine factors contributed totally to 40% of the variance on QOL. The ten factors that emerged were psychological well being, self-adequacy, physical well being, confidence in self-ability, external support, pain, mobility, optimism and belief, interpersonal relationship and self-sufficiency and independence. The internal consistency using Cronbach alpha test was 0.90 and split-half reliability was 0.74.
CONCLUSION: The tool was found to be highly reliable and valid. It was feasible to administer it at clinical settings.