Translation and cultural adaptation of quality of school life for deaf students in high school: national sample from Saudi Arabia

Despite the abundance of research on individuals with deafness in the Arab context, the availability of Arabic measures or scales, such as those measuring the Quality of Life and its various dimensions, is severely limited. Consequently, this study aims to adopt, translate into Arabic, and validate Ainley’s Quality of School Life (QoSL) scale for a national sample of students with deafness in Saudi Arabia. This cross-sectional, survey-based study included high-school students with deafness (>16 years), excluding students who were hard of hearing. The 40 items of the QoSL scale were adapted into 42 items after the authors, experts, and teachers’ forward and backwards translation and validation to check the suitability, clarity, and validity of the adopted Arabic version of the QoSL scale. In total, 269 students responded with a mean age of 17.9 ± 1.6 years and an even distribution between genders. Confirmatory factor analysis showed that the original seven domains did not fit the data. Exploratory factor analysis with oblique rotation extracted six domains from the adopted QoSL scale, which explained approximately 47% of the variation in the scale. Five of the six domains were similar to the five domains in the original QoSL scale (positive affect, negative affect, teachers, status, and identity), and the final one combined two domains (opportunity/achievement). The Cronbach’s alphas for the extracted domains ranged between 0.80 and 0.94, indicating acceptable levels of internal consistency for the domains. The students had a good QoSL as they scored on average 107.2 ± 13.4/124 points (86.5%) on the QoSL scale. The highest mean score on a single domain was for the teachers (21.5 ± 2.8/24 points) and positive affect (17.7 ± 2.7/20 points) domains. The lowest mean score was on the status (13.0 ± 2.4/16 points) and negative affect (16.3 ± 3.4/20 points) domains. This is the first Arabic version of any QoSL scale at the regional level, providing a great opportunity for researchers in Arab countries to measure the QoSL of students with deafness, and possibly without deafness, after validation.