VALIDATION OF THE WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION INSTRUMENT TO ASSES QUALITY OF LIFE BRIEF ON RENAL PATIENTS

Abstract

WHOQOL-bref is a generic instrument developed by the World Health Organization's Quality of Life Group. It evaluates Quality of Life (QOL), general and health-related, on four domains: physical, psychological, social relationships and environment. This instrument is based on the presupposition that QOL is a subjective construction obtained through an individual's perception, which is multidimensional and composed of positive and negative dimensions. Measuring a quantitative measure's reliability is the main criteria for evaluation its quality, with Cronbach's Alpha as the most sophisticated and exact way of computing it. The values for CA vary from 0 to 1, and the closes to 1, the more acceptable the instrument is. OBJECTIVE: to measure the WHOQOL-bref reliability. METHODOLOGY: quantitative study performed to measure the instrument's reliability or internal consistency, obtained through the SPSS 13.0 software, on 120 renal patients. The same domain items were grouped and the correlations were calculated. The QOL items from WHOQOL-bref were kept, and when excluding one question from each domain, no alterations to the results were observed. RESULTS: the AC yields high values for the domains, at 0.8388 in the Physical, 0.5527 in the Psychological, 0.7164 on Social Relationships and 0.6283 on Environment, showing the instrument's good internal consistency. CONCLUSION: we obtained a total scale AC equal to 0.8816, a low error variation, which leads us to conclude the evaluation instrument possesses satisfactory internal consistency characteristics, attesting the instrument's good reliability in evaluatin QOL on renal patients. We remind that the choice and use of an appropriate instrument are essential for the results to be valid and clinically significant.