Community activities and individuals' satisfaction with them: Quality of life in the first year after traumatic brain injury

Objective: To investigate the relations between community activities and satisfaction with these activities, desires to change them, and global life satisfaction. Design: Interview study with follow-up 1 month after rehabilitation discharge and 12 months postinjury. Setting: Community. Participants: One hundred sixty-two individuals hospitalized with mostly moderate-to-severe traumatic brain injury. About 90% were reached (mostly by phone) 1 month after rehabilitation discharge; 84.6%, at 12 months postinjury. Interventions: Not applicable. Main Outcome Measures: Community Integration Questionnaire-2, augmented by individuals' ratings of satisfaction or dissatisfaction with and desire to change each activity; and the Satisfaction With Life Scale. Results: Although significant correlations were found for some items, most correlations between activities and ratings of global quality of life (QOL) were low and nonsignificant. Individuals reported that they were satisfied with most of their community activities, but there were exceptions (eg, paid work). Correlations between activity-specific satisfaction and general life satisfaction were generally weak and nonsignificant. Dissatisfaction with an activity correlated strongly with desire to change the activity, but general life satisfaction did not correlate with desire to change activities. Conclusions: The lack of association between frequency of activities and subjective appraisals of them is a challenge to outcomes measurement and has implications for the targeting of rehabilitative interventions and evaluation of their worth. More research is needed to understand how individualizing functional objectives might maximize the effects of rehabilitation on the QOL of persons served.