Quality of life in Brazil: normative values for the WHOQOL-bref in a southern general population sample

Abstract

Purpose: Normative data for WHOQOL-bref are scarce in the literature and unavailable in Latin American countries. The main objective of this study was to provide normative scores of WHOQOL-bref in a general population sample in Brazil and to describe differences in mean scores according to some socio-demographic characteristics.

Methods: WHOQOL-bref was applied to a randomly selected sample of the general population of Porto Alegre. Participants were literate people aged 20 to 64 years. The questionnaires were self-administered in the presence of an interviewer in the respondent's home.

Results: The response rate was 68%, and the final sample contained 751 respondents (38% men, 62% women). Low quality of life was observed in the following subgroups: female gender, lower economic class, lower educational level, and the subgroup reporting a chronic medical condition. The mean scores of the WHOQOL-bref and percentiles of scores are reported as normative data for the general population.

Conclusion: Our results can be useful to researchers using the WHOQOL-bref to compare their results with normative data from a randomly selected sample of general population. Additionally, the ability of WHOQOL-bref to discriminate different population subgroups makes it an important tool to identify vulnerable groups in epidemiological surveys.