Validation of the American version of the CareGiver Oncology Quality of ă Life (CarGOQoL) questionnaire

Background: The CareGiver Oncology Quality of Life (CarGOQoL) ă questionnaire, a 29-item, multidimensional, self-administered ă questionnaire, was validated using a large French sample. We reported ă the linguistic validation process and the metric validity of the English ă version of CarGOQoL in the United-States. ă Methods: The translation process consisted of 3 consecutive steps: ă forward-backward translation, acceptability testing, and cognitive ă interviews. The psychometric testing was applied to caregivers of ă consecutive patients with representative cancers who were recruited from ă the Regional Cancer Center in northwestern Pennsylvania. All individuals ă completed the CarGOQoL at baseline, day-30, and day-90. Internal ă consistency, reliability, external validity, reproducibility, and ă sensitivity to change were tested. ă Results: The translated version was validated on a total of 87 American ă cancer caregivers. The dimensions of the CarGOQoL generally demonstrated ă a high internal consistency (Cronbach's alpha > 0.70 for all but four ă domain scores). External validity testing revealed that the CarGOQoL ă index score correlated significantly with all SF-36 dimension scores ă except the physical composite score (Pearson's correlation: 0.28-0.70). ă Reproducibility was satisfactory at day-30 (intraclass correlation ă coefficient: 0.46-0.94) and day-90 (0.43-0.92). Four specific dimensions ă of CarGOQoL showed responsiveness: the Psychological well-being, the ă Relationships with health care system, the Social support and the ă Finances. ă Conclusions: The American version of the CarGOQoL constitutes a useful ă instrument to measure QoL in caregivers of cancer patients in the ă United-States.