Validation of the "Quality of Life in School" instrument in Canadian elementary school students

Satvinder Ghotra; Jessie-Lee D McIsaac; Sara F L Kirk; Stefan Kuhle

doi:10.7717/peerj.1567

Validation of the "Quality of Life in School" instrument in Canadian elementary school students

PeerJ. 2016 Jan 12:4:e1567. doi: 10.7717/peerj.1567. eCollection 2016.

Authors

Satvinder Ghotra¹, Jessie-Lee D McIsaac², Sara F L Kirk², Stefan Kuhle³

Affiliations

¹ Department of Pediatrics, Division of Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine, Dalhousie University , Halifax, NS , Canada.
² School of Health and Human Performance, Dalhousie University , Halifax, NS , Canada.
³ Department of of Pediatrics and Obstetrics & Gynaecology, Dalhousie University , Halifax, NS , Canada.

Abstract

Background. School is an integral component of the life of a child, and thus quality of school life is an important part of the overall quality of life experienced by a child. There are a few instruments available to measure the quality of school life but they are often not available in English, or they are not appropriate for use alongside other instruments in a survey of young children. The Quality of Life in School (QoLS) instrument is a short, self-report measure to assess elementary school students' perception of their quality of school life in four domains. The instrument was developed in Israel and has been validated among Hebrew-speaking children. The aim of the current study was to evaluate the psychometric properties of the QoLS measure in Canadian elementary school children. Methods. A total of 629 children attending grades 4-6 were recruited in a population-based cross-sectional study. The QoLS measure was administered to participating children by trained research assistants. In addition, their socio-demographic details and academic data were also obtained. The psychometric testing included exploratory factor analysis and reliability estimation using internal consistency (Cronbach's Alpha). Construct validity was investigated using the known groups comparisons for discriminative validity and via convergent validity. Results. A four-factor structure was generated explaining 39% of the total variance in the model. The results showed good internal consistency and acceptable floor and ceiling effects. Cronbach's Alpha ranged from 0.75 to 0.93. Known groups comparisons showed that the QoLS measure discriminated well between subgroups on the basis of gender, grade, and academic achievement, thus providing evidence of construct validity. The convergent validity was also appropriate with all the four domains demonstrating moderate to strong correlations to each other and to the total QoLS score. Conclusions. QoLS appears to be a valid and reliable measure for quality of school life assessment in young Canadian children.

Keywords: Canada; Children; Measurement; Quality of life; School; Validation.

Grants and funding

This work was supported by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) (FRN 127082). Sara Kirk holds a CIHR Canada Research Chair in Health Services Research. Jessie-Lee McIsaac was supported by a postdoctoral fellowship from KT Canada and CIHR as well as a Bright Red Graduate Research Award from the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.