EQOL · Enhancing Quality of Life
FP6 — Marie Curie Actions (Human Resources and Mobility)
- Duration
- 2005-05-01 → 2006-04-30
- EU contribution
- €40,000
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- ERG
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners. CORDIS does not always give exact coordinates for projects before 2014. These points are placed at city or country level.
Results in brief
Final Activity Report Summary - EQOL (Enhancing Quality of Life)
Quality of Life (QoL) research, particularly in healthcare, is a major topic for the individual patient as well as for health care policy reasons. The main focus so far in QoL research is restricted to instrument development and their application, for instance assessing the impact of medical treatment regimes on QoL. However the nature of QoL and the process of its judgment are only beginning to be better understood. Questions such as - how people construct their assessment about their own QoL - remain largely unclear. The overall aim of this project is to develop a framework to highlight the possibilities to improve the QoL of individuals in the health care setting in Europe. The project objectives based on the previous 2 year Marie Curie Fellowship at the Royal College of Surgeons (Prof. H. McGee) were to investigate: 1) Response shift: response shift refers to a change in the meaning of QoL. Response-shift can be seen as a nuisance variable in research or as a phenomena worthy of considerations as part of the dynamic nature of human experience. 2) Psychological well-being: previous research has focused on the relationship between negative emotions (e.g. depression) and QoL. However, less is known about the relationship between positive emotions and QoL. 3) Heuristics: mental short cuts used in cognitive evaluations such as judgment about QoL are underinvestigated. 400 medical students and 100 cardiology patients have been approached successfully to investigate the above topics. Currently the main analysis of the data is undergoing. So far the data shows that individuals do use mental short cuts, such as availability heuristics to come to a judgment about their individual QoL. Depending on the framing of questions to assess QoL, people tend to make significant different judgments. Psychological well-being and QoL seems to be closely related, however they can be viewed as distinct concepts. Psychological well-being is necessary to develop and maintain a good QoL. Therefore it is not sufficient enough to be free from negative emotions (e.g. depression), it is rather also important to have good psychological well-being to devlop or maintain a good QoL.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Quality of Life (QoL) research, particularly in healthcare, continues to expand. The final judgment of the impact of a medical treatment is typically made by its ability to positively change the QoL, or at least not to reduce QoL, alongside its treatment i mpact on life expectancy. The nature of QoL and the process of its judgement is only beginning to be understood. Many writers note the lack of conceptual development in QoL. However, this acknowledgment seldom results in concrete proposals to advance the f ield. How people construct assessment about their QoL remains largely unclear. Conceptual ambiguity is illustrated by research findings. Recent research shows that individuals may undergo a shift in expectations, values and views they hold about life (resp onse shift). These may influence the context of their QoL judgment. These challenges need to be understood firstly to comprehensively understand QoL as assessed over time in a medical condition and then to be able to move to developing methods of conceptua lly influencing QoL, rather than seeing it only as a informative outcome variable. The overall aim of this project will be to develop a framework to highlight the possibilities to improve the QoL of individuals in the health setting in Europe. The project aims to understand how the perception of QoL is influenced by response shift, by psychological well-being and heuristics in healthy and diseased populations. The project will contribute to the question concerning the state or trait nature of QoL. Taking he uristics into account, the scientific community will be able to better understand how to assess QoL while controlling for heuristics. This may lead to improved guidelines about questionnaire design. Building on two years of Dr. Hofer¿s experience as a EU M C-Fellow, a number of research objectives will be targeted such as response shift, psychological well-being, heuristics and means to enhance QoL of the individual over this 2.5 year research project.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- MEDIZINISCHE UNIVERSITAET INNSBRUCK · INNSBRUCKCoordinatorCity levelAustria
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union