Quality of life questionnaire in inflammatory bowel disease patients

Inflammatory bowel diseases (IBD) are diseases that effect the life quality of the patient. There is not a valid and reliable questionnaire about the quality of life in IBD in Turkish language. This research is a descriptive and a methodologic research, aiming to describe the validity and the reliability of the "Inflammatory Bowel Disease Quality of Life Questionnaire" (IBD-QOL), which was published in 1992 and validated in different countries, for Turkish population. Materials and Method: In the research,conscious, literate and willing patients above the age of 18 (n=176, mean age 44.1 ± 13.5) that have admitted to the Dokuz Eylul University Inflammatory Bowel Diseases Clinic during the time period March-May 2013 were included. IBD-QOL was applied to the patients via the "face-to-face" method. To calculate the reliability of the questionnaire, 30 patients filled the questionnaire for a second time after two weeks. The IBD-QOL is a complex scale about its structure and scoring, and it consists of 36 questions. The factor analysis structure of the questionnaire consists of five dimensions; "Systemic symptoms", "Bowel symptoms", Functional impairment", "Social impairment" and "Emotional function". SPSS 18.0 program was used to analyze the data. Results: 44.3% of the research group is female, and 21.6% of them have an elementary education level. IBD-QOL was translated from English to Turkish via "Translation-re-translation" method. The content validity of the questionnaire was tested with the opinion of an expert. To test the reliability of the scale, evaluation was made via inner consistency, item-total correlation and the scale was proven to be reliable (Cronbach-alpha coefficient was 0.951, and all item-total correlation values were significant, p<0.05 and rho values > 0.50). According to the results of the factor analysis, which was applied to test the structure validity of IBD-QOL, the questions were collected under four factors and with this factor structure, 62.77% of the total variance could be explained.