Family quality of life: adaptation to Spanish population of several family support questionnaires.
Spanish-language Beach Center family scales are valid and ready for early-intervention use.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team translated three Beach Center family tools into Spanish. They tested the scales with Spanish parents of young children with intellectual disability.
Confirmatory factor analysis checked whether the questions still grouped the same way after translation.
What they found
The Spanish versions kept the same factor structure as the originals. All three scales passed the statistical tests for valid measurement.
How this fits with other research
Nevin et al. (2005) had already validated a Spanish Family Quality of Life Survey in Colombia. The new work adds the Beach Center Family QOL, Partnership, and Service Inventory scales to the Spanish toolkit.
Leaf et al. (2012) used the same confirmatory approach on the FQOLS-2006 and also found good fit after trimming two sub-scales. Both studies show CFA is the go-to method for checking family measures.
Guerrero et al. (2025) warns that most FQoL items fail in rural Peru. Their finding does not clash with the Spanish success; it simply shows language alone is not enough—context and wording must match the families you serve.
Why it matters
You now have three free, ready-to-use Spanish scales that hold up psychometrically. Use them at intake, annual reviews, or grant reporting to capture family voice in their own language. Start with the short Family QOL scale; it takes five minutes and gives you a baseline for goal setting and service adjustment.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
BACKGROUND: 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. METHOD: 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. RESULTS: 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. CONCLUSIONS: The developed measures may serve as a foundation for good decision-making from practices and policies.
Journal of intellectual disability research : JIDR, 2011 · doi:10.1111/j.1365-2788.2010.01350.x