Development and preliminary validation of a health-related family quality of life instrument.

MULTITRAIT multimethod techniques; RESEARCH funding; QUALITATIVE research; CRONBACH'S alpha; RESEARCH methodology evaluation; BREAST tumors; RESEARCH evaluation; FAMILIES; FAMILY relations; DESCRIPTIVE statistics; EXPERIMENTAL design; FEMALE reproductive organ tumors; THEMATIC analysis; RESEARCH methodology; QUALITY of life; TEST validity; WOMEN'S health; CANCER patient psychology; DATA analysis software; FACTOR analysis; CONFIDENCE intervals

The researchers' aims for this preliminary study was to develop an instrument, guided by the Theory of Health-related Family Quality of Life, to measure health-related family quality of life (HR-FQoL) as perceived by women with cancer. The researchers used a two phase design for instrument development: (1) establishing face validity of a 38-item instrument with an expert panel and patient review, and (2) focusing on the internal structure and construct validity of the instrument with responses from female patients (N = 236) with a cancer diagnosis (breast, gynecologic). The researchers identified a final 25-item HR-FQoL instrument with four sub-scales that each captured multiple concepts within the Theory of HR-FQoL. The resulting instrument maybe used by researchers and clinicians to assess various aspects of health-related family quality of life among female breast and gynecological cancer survivors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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