Compare methods

	Family Quality of Life Scale	Disability Life-History Narrative Method
Field	Disability Studies	Disability Studies
Family	Latent structure	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2006	2008
Originator	Lesa Hoffman, Janet Marquis, Denise Poston, Jean Ann Summers & Ann Turnbull (Beach Center on Disability)	Brett Smith & Andrew C. Sparkes (narrative inquiry in disability studies)
Type	Family-level quality-of-life measurement scale	Narrative-inquiry qualitative method for disability research
Seminal source	Hoffman, L., Marquis, J., Poston, D., Summers, J. A., & Turnbull, A. (2006). Assessing Family Outcomes: Psychometric Evaluation of the Beach Center Family Quality of Life Scale. Journal of Marriage and Family, 68(4), 1069-1083.	Smith, B., & Sparkes, A. C. (2008). Narrative and its potential contribution to disability studies. Disability & Society, 23(1), 17-28.
Aliases	Beach Center Family Quality of Life Scale, FQOL Scale, Family Quality of Life Survey, Beach Center FQOL	Disability Narrative Inquiry, Narrative Analysis in Disability Studies, Disability Life Story Method, Biographical Narrative Method in Disability Research
Related	3	3
Summary	The Beach Center Family Quality of Life Scale (FQOL) measures quality of life at the level of the family unit rather than the individual, designed especially for families that include a member with a disability. Developed at the University of Kansas Beach Center on Disability by Lesa Hoffman, Janet Marquis, Denise Poston, Jean Ann Summers and Ann Turnbull, and psychometrically evaluated in 2006, the scale asks family members to rate their satisfaction across five domains: family interaction, parenting, emotional well-being, physical and material well-being, and disability-related support. Its central move is treating the family, not the person, as the unit whose quality of life is assessed, reflecting a disability-studies and family-systems view that support and outcomes are collective.	The disability life-history narrative method collects and analyzes disabled people's life stories as a way of understanding disability from the inside, attending not only to what people say happened but to how they tell it. Articulated for the field by Brett Smith and Andrew Sparkes in their 2008 Disability & Society article on narrative's contribution to disability studies, the approach distinguishes the storyteller stance (working with stories, telling alongside) from the story-analyst stance (analyzing stories as objects), and offers structural, performative, and creative-analytic ways to interpret narratives. Its distinctive contribution is to treat stories as both data about lives and as the very means through which disabled identity and meaning are made.