Assessing family outcomes: Psychometric evaluation of the beach center family quality of life scale

There is currently a lack of reliable scales with which to assess the construct of family quality of life, particularly for families who have children with disabilities. The current work presents 2 studies, including a total of 488 families with children with disabilities, which were conducted to complete the development of a scale to assess family quality of life. The measure was refined through confirmatory factor analyses into 25 items that assess 5 domains of Family Quality of Life: Family Interaction, Parenting, Emotional Well-Being, Physical/Material Well-Being, and Disability-Related Support. Each subscale was found to be unidimensional and internally consistent. An initial examination of test-retest reliability and convergent validity is also presented. Implications for future research, scale use, and policy are discussed.