Introduction
The Singapore Caregiver Quality of Life Scale (SCQOLS) is a questionnaire that measures five domains of quality of life for family caregivers of patients. The 51-item questionnaire was developed through qualitative research with family caregivers in Singapore and quantitative evaluation for validity and reliability in over 600 family caregivers of patients with advanced cancer in Singapore.
The questionnaires are distributed free of charge upon receipt of a request form.
SCQOLS-51 (Full version)
SCQOLS has an English and a Chinese version.
SCQOLS-10 and SCQOLS-15 (Short version)
Two short versions of the SCQOLS have also been developed
and validated (SCQOLS-10 and SCQOLS-15). It is available in
English, Chinese and Malay.
How to Administer and Score
The steps for calculating the SCQOLS scores are in the Stata do
file.
The items use a 5-point scale, from Not at All (0) to Very Much
(4). Negatively worded items are recoded such that a higher
score indicates a better QOL.
The domain score is the mean of its item scores multiplied by 25
to scale to the 0-100 scale, after applying the “half-rule” to handle
item non-response (if any). That is, item non-responses are
replaced by the mean of the observed item scores in the same
domain if there are responses to at least half of the domain items.
A weighted sum of the domain scores gives a total score, using
the number of items in the domains divided by the total number of
items in the full-length version as the weight.
- Click here for notes on SCQOLS-51 (full version) Scoring Algorithm
- Click here for notes on SCQOLS-15 and SCQOLS-10 (short version) Scoring Algorithm
Publications
- Cheung et al., Health and Quality of Life Outcomes 2019. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12955-019-1108-y
- Cheung et al., Journal of Clinical Epidemiology 2020. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclinepi.2020.02.003
- Cheung et al., Journal of Patient-Reported Outcomes 2020. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41687-020-00201-0
- Lee et at., Journal of Patient-Reported Outcomes 2021. https://doi.org/10.1186/s41687-021-00290-5