How well do elderly people complete individualised quality of life measures: an exploratory study

This research note describes and discusses a study which investigated the feasibility of using an individualised approach to measure the quality of life (QoL) of a sample of older people who were in receipt of an early hospital discharge service. Most participants (86%) were able to identify areas of their lives which were important to them, rate their level of functioning on each of these areas and rank their life areas in order of importance. However, 39% were unable to quantify the relative importance of each area of life. Indeed, the majority (57%) of participants who were over 75 years old could not complete this 'weighting' or evaluative stage. The results suggest that the phenomenological approach to measuring QoL may be employed successfully with older people but that the 'weighting' system used by existing individualised QoL measures needs to be refined, especially when assessing people over 75.