Quality of Life among Turkish Immigrants in Sweden: a Study for Assessing the Measurement Properties of the World Health Organization’s Quality
Quality of Life among Turkish Immigrants in Sweden: a Study for Assessing the Measurement Properties of the World Health Organization’s Quality

Summary/Abstract: Many instruments have been developed to measure the multidimensional construct of quality of life. One of them has been developed by the World Health Organization (WHOQOL-100) and adapted into different languages and cultures around the world. The authors of this study wanted to assess the measurement properties of the Turkish version of WHOQOL-100, to find out the latent factors underlying quality of life, and to determine the direction and magnitude of the interdependent effects among these factors by using structural equation modeling (SEM). The measurement properties of the Turkish version of WHOQOL-100 scale were assessed on 520 voluntary participants who were immigrants in Stockholm/Sweden. SEM gave us one second-order factor QOL and the five correlated first-order factors labelled: physical, social relations, psychological, environment and independence. In the model for total participants, all the factor loadings were high (ranging from 0.60 to 0.92 except for “sexuality” which was 0.47), indicating a strong association between each of the latent factors and their respective items. In the models which were separately constructed regarding birthplace, the authors found a strong association between each of the latent factors and their respective items. The most substantial possible effect on QOL was psychological domain (0.93), which was larger than physical health (0.84), social relations (0.82), level of independence (0.91) and environment (0.73). The effect of psychological domain on the overall quality of life is greater than those of other domains.

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