Two valid and reliable short forms of the Singapore caregiver quality of life scale were developed: SCQOLS-10 and SCQOLS-15

Abstract

Objectives: The Singapore Caregiver Quality of Life Scale (SCQOLS) comprises five domains and 51 items in total. This study aimed to develop and evaluate short forms of SCQOLS.

Study design and setting: Data were collected from 612 family caregivers of patients with advanced cancers in Singapore. Exploratory factor analysis and best subset regression were used to identify candidate items for each domain. The short forms were evaluated for measurement properties.

Results: Inclusion of at least two items per domain in the short form gave correlation coefficients of at least 0.8 with the corresponding domain scores in the full-length version. The short forms and full-length version had similar correlation coefficients with Negative Personal Impact and Positive Personal Impact measures. Two of the five domains of the 10-item version had Cronbach's alpha ≤0.50 and test-retest reliability ≤0.65. A 15-item version of the scale with two to four items per domain performed satisfactorily in all aspects evaluated.

Conclusion: A 15-item short form of the SCQOLS (SCQOLS-15) is valid and reliable for the assessment of the overall and domain-specific quality of life of family caregivers. A 10-item short form (SCQOLS-10) may serve as a quick, valid and reliable assessment of the overall level of quality of life.

Keywords: Cancer; Caregiver; Measurement scale; Quality of life; Short form.