THE QUALITY OF WELL-BEING SCALE - COMPARISON OF THE INTERVIEWER-ADMINISTERED VERSION WITH A SELF-ADMINISTERED QUESTIONNAIRE

The Quality of Well-being Scale (QWB) is a general measure of health-r elated quality of life that has been used in a wide variety of populat ion and clinical studies. One of the major disadvantages of the QWB is that it requires a trained interviewer. Recently, a self-administered version of the QWB was developed. The purpose of this study was to co mpare the self-administered QWB with the established interviewer-admin istered form. The respondents were 218 English speaking adults who att ended primary care clinics. Each respondent was evaluated twice with a n interval of one month in-between. At each session respondents were r andomly assigned to complete either the interviewer-administered or se lf-administered QWB, resulting in a 2 x 2 factorial design. Data from the study demonstrated that the self-administered QWB yields scores eq uivalent to the interviewer-administered form. Further, QWB scores rem ain stable over the course of a one month interval. The results sugges t that an inexpensive self-administered QWB may produce data comparabl e to the more difficult and expensive interviewer-administered version . Disadvantages of self-administered forms are also discussed.