From the ground up: assessing the face validity of the Quality of Life – Aged Care Consumers (QOL-ACC) measure with older Australians

Abstract

Purpose

This paper aims to assess the face validity to inform content validity of the Quality of Life – Aged Care Consumers (QOL-ACC), a new measure for quality assessment and economic evaluation in aged care.

Design/methodology/approach

Semi-structured interviews were conducted with older adults (66–100 years) receiving aged care services at home (n = 31) and in residential care (n = 28). Participants provided feedback on draft items to take forward to the next stage of psychometric assessment. Items were removed according to several decision criteria: ambiguity, sensitive wording, not easy to answer and/or least preferred by participants.

Findings

The initial candidate set was reduced from 34 items to 15 items to include in the next stage of the QOL-ACC development alongside the preferred response category. The reduced set reflected the views of older adults, increasing the measure’s acceptability, reliability and relevance.

Originality/value

Quality of life is a key person-centred quality indicator recommended by the recent Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety. Responding to this policy reform objective, this study documents a key stage in the development of the QOL-ACC measure, a new measure designed to assess aged care specific quality of life.

Citation

Cleland, J., Hutchinson, C., McBain, C., Khadka, J., Milte, R., Cameron, I. and Ratcliffe, J. (2023), "From the ground up: assessing the face validity of the Quality of Life – Aged Care Consumers (QOL-ACC) measure with older Australians", Quality in Ageing and Older Adults, Vol. 24 No. 1/2, pp. 3-18. https://doi.org/10.1108/QAOA-07-2022-0046