Abstract

In developing countries, the quality of higher education is essential, as this would allow to achieve a good job and therefore, opt for greater well-being and quality of life. As a consequence, education centers have begun to generate greater openness to respond to the progressive demand for training and the number of university students has grown exponentially. This growing admission of students to higher education, makes preventive and health measures increasingly necessary in these institutions, since they have a direct impact on this sector of the population and as a consequence, on society. In this context, the Quality of College Life (QCL) has gained importance, understanding this as the levels of satisfaction of the students about their life experience at the university. Given the particularities of the local university context and that there are no adapted or validated instruments that allow to verify the QCL, the present study aimed at the construction and validation of an instrument that allows evaluating the QCL of Chilean university students, according to their satisfaction with the academic, administrative, facilities, social, sports, student welfare and diversity aspects. The methodology used was qualitative-quantitative, non-experimental, and cross-sectional in scope. In the first stage of the construction process, focus groups were held, which allowed various categories of meaning to emerge through content analysis. In this way, a first version of the questionnaire was constructed, which was subsequently subjected to validation by experts and a pilot test. After this, the constructed questionnaire was refined and applied to 1825 students from various careers and courses through the University’s virtual platform. The young people who responded, first accepted an informed consent, in which the objectives of the research were explained, that this had the approval of the accredited ethics committee of the region, that the results are treated anonymously and that their response is voluntary, and that they could stop responding at any time, if they so wished. Once the results were obtained, quantitative analyzes were carried out, which included reliability, exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis. The latter made it possible to verify the factorial structure of the questionnaire, using a second independent sample. The results indicate that the QCL questionnaire presents adequate internal consistency and satisfactory psychometric properties, presenting 7 factors that explain 45.5 % of the total variance, being a reliable and valid instrument to measure QCL. Our questionnaire has more factors than others, but this could be due to existing cultural differences, in addition to differences in construction procedures. In our research, the focus groups were applied to the different university campuses to avoid territorial bias, and the sample consisted of students from different careers. These made it possible to detect relevant aspects for our university, regional and national context, which did not emerge in other similar investigations. Our students showed a notorious concern for mental health and student welfare services offered by the university, for aspects related to inclusion of students with disabilities and in relation to diversity. All the aforementioned differences may have influenced the fact that in the factorial analyzes it was necessary to use seven factors to include both, at the content level, the most relevant aspects for the students of the study university, as well as the amount of factors necessary to cover the highest percentage possible. of the total variance explained. Undoubtedly, this work can be improved, but it is hoped that this instrument contributes to the measurement of the aspects that intervene in the QCL of Chilean students and that the information collected will allow the generation of preventive strategies and provide greater responses to their needs.