Background: In this work the validation of the Spanish version of the Rotterdam Symptom Checklist (RSCL) to assess quality of life in cancer patients has been approached. The main goal of this study is to evaluate the psychometric properties of the questionnaire and its equivalence with the original English questionnaire.
Methods: The questionnaire was administered to a sample of 162 terminal cancer patients and 59 cancer patients treated with chemotherapy. The internal structure, was evaluated through a confirmatory factor analysis in TCP, the discriminatory power according to clinical situation of cancer patients, the internal consistency in both samples and the responsiveness to the changes over time after chemotherapy treatment was evaluated in PQT.
Results: The internal structure of scales was similar in TCP to the original version. The cancer patients showed worse scores than the PQT. The reliability was > or = 0.70 for the scales and > or = 0.50 for the subscales except chemotherapy subscale. The scores of the scales were different (p < 0.05) before and after treatment, except for the psychological scale.
Conclusions: These results confirm the usefulness of the spanish version of the RSCL as a subjective measure of well-being in cancer patients.