The present study verified the reliability and the construct validity of the French version of the 36-Item Short Form Survey (SF-36) questionnaire in a young population.
Cronbach’s alpha measures suggested that the SF-36 questionnaire was internally reliable, with measured alphas remaining in the .70 ≤ ɑ ≤ .90 interval recommended by (Bland and Altman, 1997; DeVellis, 2003).
Further confirmatory factor analysis supported the eight-factor structure of the SF-36 questionnaire, with items 1;33;34;35;36 grouped in the “General Health” factor, items 23;27;29;31 grouped in the “Vitality” factor, items 21;22 grouped in the “Body Pain” factor, items 13;14;15;16 grouped in the “Role limitation : Physical” factor, items 17;18;19 grouped in the “Role limitation : Emotional” factor, items 24;25;26;28;30 grouped in the “Mental Health” factor, items 3;4;5;6;7;8;9;10;11;12 grouped in the “Physical Functioning” factor, and items 20;32 grouped in the “Social Functioning” factor. Analysis suggested that this model is close to the standards defined by (Hu and Bentler, 1999), with only CFI and TLI which remains slightly below the cut-off.
We then performed a factor analysis that suggested some gender differences in self-reported responses, with women reporting lower quality of life than men for all domains studied except BP, which is coherent with previous studies in France and over the world (Demiral et al., 2006; El Osta et al., 2019; Hopman et al., 2000; Khader et al., 2011; Perneger et al., 1995; Sabbah et al., 2003). We thus established normative data expressed as percentiles for each gender.