Family quality of life: adaptation to Spanish population of several family support questionnaires

The concept of family quality of life has emerged as a decisive construct in the last decades to improve the capabilities of families and to assess the outcomes of the services and supports they get. The goal of this research is to adapt three instruments to the Spanish population: the 'Beach Center Family Quality of Life Scale', the 'Beach Center Family-Professional Partnership Scale' and the 'Service Inventory'. These tools were originally designed by researchers from the Beach Center on Disability, University of Kansas, in order to obtain some input from the families of people with intellectual disability (ID) with regard to the attention they get from the early childhood intervention services.

The sample included a total of 202 families of children with ID, between 0 and 6 years old, all of them cared for at 13 early childhood intervention centres. Based on a confirmatory factorial analysis, we have explored the psychometric properties of the three scales administered to respondents. Statistical analyses were conducted with the spss software version 17.0 and the EQS software version 6.1 for Structural Equation Models.

The results confirm that the factor structure of the 'Beach Center Family Quality of Life Scale', the 'Beach Center Family-Professional Partnership Scale' and the 'Service Inventory' adapted for the Spanish population fit the factor models proposed by the authors of the surveys. Consequently, the scales are ready to be used.

The developed measures may serve as a foundation for good decision-making from practices and policies.