Measurement properties of the Adolescent Quality of Life Mental Health Scale (AQOL-MHS).
BACKGROUND
This article presents data on the psychometric properties of a new measure, the Adolescent Quality of Life Mental Health Scale (AQOL-MHS), designed to measure quality of life in clinical samples of Latino adolescents aged 12-18 years. Participants were recruited in Puerto Rico to have one of five prevalent mental health disorders. The initial instrument development was achieved through a grounded theory approach with the use of focus groups and in-depth interviews.


METHODS
We conducted two stages of exploratory factor analyses (EFA) on 60 candidate items. The first stage was to establish the number of factors to extract, and the second was to improve the model by selecting the best items. A final EFA model retained 31 items and 3 factors labeled Emotional Regulation (11 items), Self-Concept (10 items) and Social Context (10 items).


RESULTS
The instrument showed good internal consistency, test-retest reliability, and construct validity. The hypotheses-driven validity tests were all supportive of the AQOL-MHS. There was evidence for convergent validity and discriminant validity, and results for known-groups' validity were overwhelmingly supportive of the ability of the instrument to identify differences between groups.


CONCLUSIONS
These preliminary findings support our conceptual model and the use of the AQOL-MHS domain and overall scores. We believe that this instrument will provide clinicians additional insight into the different aspects of quality of life that are important to adolescents with mental health problems. Therefore, we consider the AQOL-MHS a vital patient-centered outcome measure for assessment strategies in the prevention and treatment of this population.
University of Puerto Rico MSC, San Juan, PR, USA, ligia.chavez@upr.edu.
Ligia M
LM
Chavez
Rafael
R
Ramirez
Pedro
P
Garcia
Glorisa
G
Canino
Karen
K
Mir
Nyrma
N
Ortiz
Leo S
LS
Morales
D000293:Adolescent; D002648:Child; D003469:Culture; D004644:Emotions; D005163:Factor Analysis, Statistical; D005260:Female; D017144:Focus Groups; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D001523:Mental Disorders / Q000523:psychology*; D008603:Mental Health; D063868:Patient Outcome Assessment; D010549:Personal Satisfaction; D011237:Predictive Value of Tests; D011594:Psychometrics / Q000295:instrumentation*; D011647:Puerto Rico; D011788:Quality of Life / Q000523:psychology*; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012649:Self Concept