Psychometric properties of the Urdu version of the World Health Organization's quality of life questionnaire (WHOQOL-BREF)

The present study was conducted to translate and validate the World Health Organization’s Quality-of-Life Scale -BREF into local language of Pakistan.

A forward- backward translation procedure was followed to develop the Pakistani version of the questionnaire. Through a multi- stage clustered sampling technique, a sample of individuals aged 18 years and above completed the questionnaire in Abbottabad district, Pakistan. Psychometric properties of the instrument including reliability (internal consistency and test-retest analysis), validity (known group comparison and items’ correlation) and their domains were assessed. Satisfactory results were also shown in the correlation matrix in all domains.

A total of 2060 participants were recruited in this study. Participants’ mean age was 35.51 (SD= 14.31) years in healthy individuals and 39.29 (SD= 14.31) years in diseased individuals. The internal consistency of the WHOQOL-BREF (Pakistani Version) was 0.86. Moreover, the physical, psychological, and environmental domains had acceptable reliability (alpha= 0.78, 0.75, and 0.73, respectively), but reliability was low (alpha= 0.56) in the social domain. Reproducibility of the WHOQOL-BREF was as follows: ICC range: 0.72–0.92 at 2-week retest interval. After performing comparison analysis, the results indicated that the questionnaire significantly segregated the study groups in all QoL domains, except for social relationship.

The study provided strong exploratory evidence for the reliability and validity of the WHOQOL-BREF for use in Pakistan. However, more exploration is needed to improve the reliability results in the social domain.