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	Schalock Quality of Life Model	Model Disability Survey
Field	Disability Studies	Disability Studies
Family	Latent structure	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2002	2022
Originator	Robert L. Schalock and Miguel Angel Verdugo	World Health Organization and World Bank (Model Disability Survey collaboration)
Type	Multidimensional quality-of-life measurement framework	General-population survey operationalizing the ICF biopsychosocial model of functioning
Seminal source	Schalock, R. L., & Verdugo, M. A. (2002). Handbook on Quality of Life for Human Service Practitioners. Washington, DC: American Association on Mental Retardation. ISBN: 9780940898776	Sabariego, C., Fellinghauer, C., Lee, L., et al. (2022). Generating comprehensive functioning and disability data worldwide: development process, data analyses strategy and reliability of the WHO and World Bank Model Disability Survey. Archives of Public Health, 80, 6.
Aliases	Schalock-Verdugo QOL Model, Eight-Domain Quality of Life Framework, Multidimensional QOL Model, QOL Domains Model	MDS, WHO Model Disability Survey, Metric Disability Continuum Survey, ICF-Based Functioning Survey
Related	3	3
Summary	The Schalock and Verdugo Quality of Life model is a multidimensional framework for conceptualizing and measuring quality of life among people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Drawing on cross-cultural and empirical work synthesized in their 2002 Handbook on Quality of Life for Human Service Practitioners, Schalock and Verdugo define quality of life as a composite of eight core domains: emotional well-being, interpersonal relations, material well-being, personal development, physical well-being, self-determination, social inclusion, and rights. These domains are organized under three higher-order factors — independence, social participation, and well-being — that give the model a coherent structure. Crucially, each domain is measured using both objective indicators, such as observable life conditions, and subjective indicators, such as the person's own satisfaction, recognizing that quality of life has both an external and an experienced face. The framework is designed not only to describe a person's quality of life but to drive person-centered planning and to evaluate whether services actually improve the outcomes that matter to people.	The Model Disability Survey is a general-population survey developed jointly by the World Health Organization and the World Bank to generate comprehensive, internationally comparable data on functioning and disability. Unlike instruments that classify people as disabled or not, it operationalizes the biopsychosocial model of the WHO ICF, treating disability as the outcome of an interaction between a person's intrinsic capacity and the environment in which they live. The survey collects detailed self-reported information on how much difficulty people have across many domains of functioning, distinguishing what a person can do in a standardized environment (capacity) from what they actually do in their own environment (performance), and it separately measures environmental barriers and facilitators. As documented by Sabariego and colleagues in 2022, these responses are combined using a Rasch measurement model into a single metric scale, so that disability is represented as a continuum running across the whole population rather than as a yes/no category. The result is a graded picture of functioning suited to prevalence estimation, equity analysis, and policy on a comparable metric.