QUALITY-OF-LIFE IN EPILEPSY - MULTIDIMENSIONAL PROFILE AND UNDERLYINGLATENT DIMENSIONS

Part of our study, the Dutch Quality of Life and Quality of Care Inves tigation in Epilepsy (DUQQIE), intended to cover several of the compon ents of the quality of life (QoL) concept. To this end, a series of al ready existing generic and disease-specific instruments was selected c overing several parts of the QoL components in order to construct a mu ltidimensional ''QoL profile'' for people with epilepsy and to look fo r underlying second-order QoL dimensions. From the records of four out patient clinics, 210 persons with epilepsy were randomly selected. Dur ing their visit to the outpatient clinic, they completed a questionnai re assessing, among others, health perceptions, psychological well-bei ng, and social functioning. Additional information shout their medical and psyche-social status was gathered from the patient files. A large part of our research group was not seizure-free. As far as comparison s with other patient or healthy groups could be made, it appeared that they mostly did not (much) worse and all scores were above the scale midpoint. However, almost two-thirds of the scale means lied below a s o-called ''normative mean.'' Higher-order factor analysis yielded one general factor measuring the ''Overall Quality of Life.'' Furthermore, after rotation of this general factor, two separate factors could be constructed referring to the psycho-physical and psyche-social aspects of QoL, respectively. We decided not to develop ''quality of life ins trument'' de novo to the already vast and ever increasing area of QoL instruments, but to use already existing, mostly generic, and well-val idated instruments. The most important advantage of this approach is t hat it allows for ''normative controls'' (norms; other groups) and ''c onceptual modeling.'' The latter is that the QoL concept can be unfold ed into its component parts and hypothetically related to each other. (C) 1998 by Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved.