Leisure Questionnaire of People with Multiple Sclerosis

Leisure activities are an important part of life for people with multiple sclerosis )MS). Unfortunately, there are no proper assessment tools for evaluating the leisure activities of MS patients. The current research purposed to develop such a questionnaire and to determine its factor structure.

This psychometric study aimed to determine the factor structure of a questionnaire for evaluating the leisure activities of MS patients and was conducted in explanatory and confirmatory phases.

The questionnaire was completed, and the data were entered in SPSS for the explanatory phase and using linear structural relations (LISREL) for the confirmatory phase. The lowest Eigenvalue was 1.01, which corresponds to the Kaiser criterion. The validity coefficients of the extracted factors are considerable. There is a very slight difference between the highest coefficient thatis related to the third factor (0.846) and the lowest coefficient that is related to the fifth factor (0.799), indicating the number of factors was correctly determined. Confirmatory factor analysis illustrated that the goodness-of-fit (GFI) and the comparative fit index (CFI) indices were considerable (higher than 0.95),showing good fit of data. RMSEA was 0.024.

It can be concluded that the 5-factor structure (difficult, social,spiritual/religious, outdoor-physical, and cultural-artistic activities) of the multiple sclerosis leisure questionnaire with 50 items is confirmed.