College Freshmen’s Quality of Life and Its Perceived Determinants: A Case Study of a Chinese Island University

Abstract

The aims of the study were to investigate health-related quality of life (QoL) and its perceived determinants among college freshmen at an island Chinese University located between China and Taiwan. The framework of QoL given by the WHO was employed to evaluate the QoL of 404 college freshmen in January 2013, and a retrospective approach was adopted to solicit the participants' perceived determinants of their QoL. Each participant completed the WHOQOL-BREF questionnaire and specified reasons for their degree of satisfaction in each life facet addressed in the questionnaire. The participants expressed a moderate degree of satisfaction in all of the life facets measured (M = 3.29), with 3.4 in the physical, 3.3 in the psychological, 3.1 in the social, and 3.2 in the environmental domain on a 5-point scale. Among the 24 life facets assessed, sleep quality, transportation availability, medical service quality, concentration, and energy were the top five unsatisfactory facets. Determinants of the participants' QoL involved multiple factors such as the ease of day-to-day living, living environment, psychological factors, time arrangement, sleep quality, etc. The freshmen year is a transition period requiring great adjustment in lifestyle due to the change from secondary to tertiary education and from home stay with parents' care to independent dormitory life. The findings of the study indicated that college freshmen in the context of the university studied had not experienced expected satisfactory levels of life quality, and that the perceived determinants of their life quality could be further addressed for promotion of health and education quality. The study could serve as an example to call for regular examinations on students' experience and discrepancies between experience and expectation in order to address related issues for higher educational quality.