POSITIVE-NEGATIVE EVALUATION (PNE) SCALE - A NEW DIMENSION OF THE SUBJECTIVE DOMAINS OF QUALITY-OF-LIFE MEASURE

A new subjective measure of Quality of Life (QOL), the Subjective Doma ins of Quality of Life Measure (SDQLM), developed by Bar-On and Amir,( 1) is a qualitative and quantitative self-structured method shown to h ave internal reliability and construct validity compared with quantita tive pre-structured measures and evaluations by spouses and physicians . To earlier analyses on a sample of male hypertensives and normotensi ves, we added a content analysis which is reported here, in which the elicited QOL domains were assessed according to whether the respondent evaluated his QOL domains as positive, negative or neutral/mixed. The content analysis showed that respondents may be classified on a conti nuous scale from stable positive to stable negative evaluations of the ir QOL domains (before-after measurement). The scale was assembled by ordinal ranging of the answers at two points in time (one year apart). A respondent who evaluated his domain as positive at both such points was ranked highest on the scale, negative at both points the lowest a nd the two remaining possibilities constituted the middle range. Analy sis of the data showed that the SDQLM with this additional content ana lysis correlated significantly with depression scale scores, sexual fu nctioning, physical fitness, work satisfaction, quality of sleep, hard iness, education and age, as well as individual self-rating of QOL. Th e subjective measure based on self-elicited domains with PNE was shown to be an important construct compared with pre-structured measures of QOL.