Quality of Life and Artistic Expression in College Students: Creation of Measurement Tool

QUALITY OF LIFE AND ARTISTIC EXPRESSION IN COLLEGE STUDENTS: CREATION OF MEASUREMENT TOOL

Introduction: initiative and artistic creativity of college students has been reflected through the development of strategies and artistic training workshops that seek to develop the skills and desire to express the different art forms: dance, theater, and singing. These groups have had great success and contributed to project the talent and develop strategies to reduce stress, improve lifestyle and achieve goals such as acting on behalf of the National University of Colombia in academic, cultural and artistic events internal and external order local, national and international. Artistic expression is recognized as an element that contributes to the quality of life and is essential to achieving optimal health states. However, the National University of Colombia does not have measurement tools that establish psychometric quality objectively the impact generated artistic practices in the quality of life of students.

The study of quality of life (QOL) currently has spread from an individualistic and epidemiological role a framework of broad and multidimensional conceptual reference. This construct is multidimensional and complex and involves objective aspects (such as the physical and material) and subjective as the perception-assessment of psychological well-being , social relational, personal, emotional and spiritual. Therefore, things CV is an agent of social change  whose ultimate goal is to improve conditions and objective circumstances of life of individuals.

Objective The research study aims to create an instrument to measure from scientific research criteria, the impact of artistic practices in the quality of life of those who favor these forms of expression for their comprehensive training.

Methodology The project focuses on the psychometric perspective, it makes a methodological study essentially designed and development in different phase’s first part about definition and structuring elements of the instrument, second part in order to stablish psychometric assessment instrument we have two distinct moments to validate it. One in which 16 experts were consulted judges the content validity of the instrument and an application built in 150 students, half belonging to institutional artistic groups and the remaining percentage of students were conducted to not practice artistic expression as part of their life.

Results

We invite 150 students from the National University of Colombia to be the sample, aged between 17 and 27 years. The Instrument consists of five dimensions (social, physical, emotional, material and personal development) items are four-level Likert type. Validated by expert opinion, conducting a factor analysis with Varimax orthogonal rotation, and analysis of the items with the model of Classical Test Theory (TCT) for validation we use several strategies. Validation of judges by Kendall concordance coefficient for related samples indicate a high-level agreement (Kendall's W = 0.18); factorial analysis resulted in five interpretable factors that account for the welcome theoretical structure, and finally, after item analysis performed, the scale was reduced to 50 items (10 per dimension).

Conclusions:

We have an instrument to measure quality of life in Young University with psychometric qualities.

The  instrument  GAI- UN will be used to recognize if there is difference in the quality of life in young people who develop artistic and cultural as part of their academic training activities.