The QOLP-PD has been designed to offer a new approach to measuring QOL that is grounded in and congruent with the perspective and experience of people with disabilities. It has been based on the Center for Health Promotion (CHP) Quality of Life model that views QOL as arising out of the ongoing relationship between the person and his/her environment (Renwick & Brown 1996). In this sense, CHP addresses concepts similar to various disability models (e.g. ICF, DCP). The QOLP-PD is comprised of 102 items classified into the 3 CHP domains: being, belonging, and becoming.

Procedure: The items in the 3 domains are grouped into 9 sub-scores. All items are rated on a 5-point scale for satisfaction and importance, ranging from 1 (not at all satisfied/important) to 5 (extremely satisfied/important).  Overall scores are made more comprehensible by subtracting 3, leading to a range of scores from negative 10 (not at all satisfied/extremely important issues) to positive 10 (extremely satisfied/extremely important issues).

Advantages: The QOLP-PD comes from a strong conceptual model (CHP-QOL; see Renwick & Brown 1996).  It is applicable across a wide range of disabilities and it can provide information for clinical interventions (Renwick et al. 2003).

Limitations: The major limitation is the fact that this instrument is in the early stages of development with few documented psychometric characteristics. Other limitations may be similar to those of the Quality of Life Index (QLI), as the measurement approaches are similar.

Interpretability: Being in the early stages of development, the meaningfulness of scores, the definitions and classifications of the results and norm-based scores are undetermined.

Acceptability/ Feasibility: Owing to the 102 items that must be assessed on 2 scales, the QOLP-PD is a lengthy instrument compared to some others already available. For a copy of the tool, contact the author, Rebecca Renwick, at r.renwick@utoronto.ca.  It is currently available in English.

Clinical Summary: The QOLP-PD is a promising instrument that can provide good information to support interventions on an individual basis. Further testing is necessary prior to appraising its usefulness.

Psychometric Summary:

Note: +++ = Excellent; ++ = Adequate; + = Poor; N/A=Insufficient information; IC=internal consistency

References

• Renwick R, Brown I. The Centre for Health Promotion's conceptual approach to quality of life: being, belonging, and becoming. In: Renwick R, Brown I, Nagler N (ed). Quality of life in health promotion and rehabilitation: Conceptual approaches, issues, and applications. Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA, 1996, p 75-86.
• Renwick R, Nourhaghighi N, Manns P, Laliberté Rudman D. Quality of life for people with physical disabilities. Int J Rehab Research 2003;26:279-287.