A Comparison of Alternative Models of Individual Quality of Life for Social Service Recipients

There is considerable debate in the area of individual quality of life research regarding the factor structure of the QOL construct that is focused on the number and composition of QOL factors and domains, and its hierarchical nature. The main goal of this study involve testing by means of confirmatory factor analyses five models that have been pointed out by recent scientific literature: firstly, an unidimensional model; secondly, a QOL model that consisted of eight inter-correlated domains proposed by Schalock and Verdugo (2002); thirdly, a model composed of these eight 1st-order factors and one 2nd- order factor; the forth and five are model with the eight 1st-order factors and three 2nd-order factor that has been denominated in other studies 'Salamanca model' and 'Schalock model'. Data were collected from 3.029 social service recipients from Catalonia (Spain) who completed the GENCAT Scale, an objective QOL questionnaire. The best fit of the eight inter-correlated and 1st order domains was empirically demonstrated. Implications for future research are also discussed.