Constructing a Quality of Life Scale for Older Chinese People in Hong Kong (HKQoLOCP)

This paper reports a multi-stagestudy carried out between 1999 and 2001 whichaimed to develop an instrument to address theneed for a culturally relevant measure ofquality of life for Chinese older persons inHong Kong and similar communities. The firststage of the research involved a focus groupstudy conducted in August 1999 which it washoped would reflect how ‘quality of life’ maybe interpreted by older persons themselves. Thenext stage, a content analysis of the focusgroups, enabled the construction of aquestionnaire containing over 100 items onvarious aspects of quality of life (QoL). Thequestionnaire was reviewed by a panel ofexperts and the items were refined and reducedto 86 to which were added a further 25 itemsfor socio-demographic background. This formedthe initial instrument. The final stage was avalidation study based on a representativecommunity survey, with a sample of 3,000respondents drawn for the research team by theCensus and Statistics Department of the HongKong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR)Government. The survey yielded 1,616 successfulinterviews with older persons aged 60 or above.The careful stratification of the sampleenabled us to say that subjects in all thestages of the survey had broadly similarcharacteristics to the general Hong Kongelderly population in sex and age distribution.After a rigorous process of validation, theresearch team recommended the adoption of bothan index and six domains for measuring HongKong older persons’ QoL. The new scale containsa total of 21 items which can be grouped intovarious domains: subjective well-being, with 4items; health with 5 items; interpersonalrelationships with 6 items; achievement-recognition with 4 items, finance and livingconditions (1 item each). The overall QoL scalehas a Cronbach’s alpha of 0.72 with its domainsranging from 0.65 to 0.77 which indicates ahigh degree of statistical reliabilities. Thename recommended for the scale was ‘Hong KongQuality of Life for Older Persons Scale’-abbreviated as ‘HKQoLOCP’.