Schmidt Silke, Mühlan Holger, Power Mick
Center of Psychosocial Medicine, University Hospital of Hamburg, Germany.
Eur J Public Health. 2006 Aug;16(4):420-8. doi: 10.1093/eurpub/cki155. Epub 2005 Sep 1.
Survey research including multiple health indicators requires brief indices for use in cross-cultural studies, which have, however, rarely been tested in terms of their psychometric quality. Recently, the EUROHIS-QOL 8-item index was developed as an adaptation of the WHOQOL-100 and the WHOQOL-BREF. The aim of the current study was to test the psychometric properties of the EUROHIS-QOL 8-item index.
In a survey on 4849 European adults, the EUROHIS-QOL 8-item index was assessed across 10 countries, with equal samples adjusted for selected sociodemographic data. Participants were also investigated with a chronic condition checklist, measures on general health perception, mental health, health-care utilization and social support.
Findings indicated good internal consistencies across a range of countries, showing acceptable convergent validity with physical and mental health measures, and the measure discriminates well between individuals that report having a longstanding condition and healthy individuals across all countries. Differential item functioning was less frequently observed in those countries that were geographically and culturally closer to the UK, but acceptable across all countries. A universal one-factor structure with a good fit in structural equation modelling analyses (SEM) was identified with, however, limitations in model fit for specific countires.
The short EUROHIS-QOL 8-item index showed good cross-cultural field study performance and a satisfactory convergent and discriminant validity, and can therefore be recommended for use in public health research. In future studies the measure should also be tested in multinational clinical studies, particularly in order to test its sensitivity.
包含多个健康指标的调查研究需要简短的指标用于跨文化研究，然而，这些指标的心理测量质量很少得到检验。最近，欧洲健康、社会和生活质量指数8项指标（EUROHIS-QOL 8-item index）是作为对世界卫生组织生活质量量表100项（WHOQOL-100）和世界卫生组织生活质量量表简表（WHOQOL-BREF）的改编而开发的。本研究的目的是检验EUROHIS-QOL 8项指标的心理测量特性。
在一项对4849名欧洲成年人的调查中，在10个国家对EUROHIS-QOL 8项指标进行了评估，并根据选定的社会人口学数据对样本进行了均衡调整。还使用慢性病清单、一般健康感知测量、心理健康、医疗保健利用和社会支持等对参与者进行了调查。
研究结果表明，该指标在一系列国家中具有良好的内部一致性，与身心健康测量指标具有可接受的收敛效度，并且在所有国家中，该指标能够很好地区分报告患有长期疾病的个体和健康个体。在地理和文化上与英国更接近的国家中，差异项目功能较少被观察到，但在所有国家中都是可接受的。在结构方程模型分析（SEM）中确定了一个普遍的单因素结构，拟合良好，不过特定国家的模型拟合存在局限性。
简短的EUROHIS-QOL 8项指标在跨文化现场研究中表现良好，具有令人满意的收敛效度和区分效度，因此可推荐用于公共卫生研究。在未来的研究中，该指标也应在多国临床研究中进行测试，特别是为了测试其敏感性。
