Measuring quality of life of adults with intellectual disabilities: Psychometric evaluation of the personal outcomes scale in the United Kingdom.
Helen Buxton, Manuel Gomes, Rafael Gafoor and 2 others
PMID 38369307WHAT IT FOUND
In UK adults with intellectual disability, Personal Outcomes Scale scores did not match the intended quality-of-life model.
Item answers correlated poorly, and interviewer clustering accounted for 25.50% of score variation.
Key findings
01The 48-item Personal Outcomes Scale showed poor fit for all tested quality-of-life structures, and reducing it to 40 items did not improve fit.
02Only 44.22% of possible item correlations reached the expected minimum, and 30.02% were negative.
03In an unadjusted model, interviewer clustering accounted for 25.50% of total variance in POS scores.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The data came from one UK provider and participants were selected for convenience, so results may not apply to other services. Important participant information was missing, including intellectual disability severity and verbal communication skills. Inter-rater reliability was not estimated, so interviewer differences could not be separated from true participant differences. The interviewer analysis used 136 observations from 36 interviewers, and the median number of interviews per interviewer was 2. The factor analysis used 270 complete cases, and missing demographic data reduced the sample for other analyses.
Declared interests
The study was co-funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and Royal Mencap Society. The funders had no role in study design, analysis, interpretation, or writing. The authors declared no conflict of interest. Mencap owns the routine service data analysed.
The easy way to misread this
Do not treat POS scores as a stable measure of quality of life. The tested structures did not match the data, item correlations were weak, and interviewer clustering accounted for 25.50% of score variation.