Qualidade de vida no bairro: construção e validação de um instrumento genérico baseado na percepção de crianças brasileiras

Abstract

This is a mixed, two-stage, exploratory, and sequential study that aimed to structure a neighborhood quality of life (QoL) instrument based on the perception of Brazilian children aged 6-10 years, living in a medium-sized Brazilian municipality. The research was conducted in four public schools and a private school in the city, selected from their territorial location and the Socioeconomic Level Indicator of Elementary Education Schools. In the first stage, a qualitative study was conducted to understand the perception of children aged 6-10 years concerning QoL in the neighborhood. A class was drawn for every elementary school year in each school. All students from these classes were invited to participate in the study, and those who returned with the Informed Consent Form participated in the data collection, which was carried out with the draw, write and say method. At first, all the children drew a neighborhood with QoL and, subsequently, considering the wealth of details in the illustrations, two children from each class were intentionally selected (n=49) to narrate their drawings. The narratives were recorded, transcribed, and evaluated by qualitative content analysis. Two major themes emerged from the data evaluation: physical environment and social environment. The social environment included family and friendship relationships, and the physical environment explored community needs, such as housing, leisure facilities, essential services, and natural elements. The second stage of the study structured and validated a generic QoL in the neighborhood questionnaire for children aged 8-10 years. This stage included the generation of items, validation of content by specialists using the Delphi method (n=8), face validation (n=30) and assessment of the psychometric measures (n=261), including internal consistency assessment (Cronbach’s alpha), temporal stability (weighted Kappa - KP and Intraclass Correlation Coefficient - ICC), construct validity measured by exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and discriminant validity, which compared the differences in the total score between groups determined by sociodemographic variables. All statistical tests were performed with a 5% significance level. Of the 56 items generated, 39 were retained after content validation and face validation. The measurement of 39 items was submitted to reliability tests and the EFA, obtaining a tool with 27 items distributed into five dimensions, which showed good internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha = 0.80), good temporal stability (KP=0.30 to 0.72 and ICC=0.91) and discriminant validity capable of pointing out differences between groups determined by the variables gender, age, income and place of residence (p<0.001). The children’s perception allowed creating a QoL in the neighborhood measure with satisfactory psychometric measurements.