Quality of Life

Quality of life (QoL) is a multidimensional construct used in disability, rehabilitation, and accessibility research to capture well-being across physical health, psychological state, social relationships, and environmental factors. The World Health Organization's WHOQOL instruments (WHOQOL-100 and the shorter WHOQOL-BREF) are widely used validated measures that produce domain scores for cross-population comparison. QoL metrics are valuable for aggregate outcome evaluation — for example, comparing the well-being of wheelchair users across environments — but typically provide a snapshot rather than the moment-to-moment negotiations of caregiving, privacy, and assistance that shape daily experience. Recent accessibility research pairs QoL measures with qualitative trajectory-based methods to capture both structural patterns and lived nuance.