Conceptualizing and measuring family quality of life

Background: Increasing emphasis on family-centred approaches to services and supports for families of children with disabilities has surfaced the issue of accountability for family outcomes. We present a review of literature about the impacts of children with disabilities on families as a backdrop to proposing family quality of life as a concept that encompasses impacts of disability and one that can be used to assess the impact of supports and services on families. Method: We briefly introduce the Beach Center Family Quality of Life Scale, providing information about its factor structure, reliability and convergent validity. Results: The Beach Center Family Quality of Life Scale contains 25 items assessing family ratings of importance and satisfaction with five domains: Family interaction, Parenting, Emotional well-being, Physical/material well-being and Disability-related supports. Conclusion: We present a framework for utilizing a measure of family quality of life as a long-term outcome in concert with other short-term measures of service outcomes for families.