Measures of Quality of Life among University Students

This article outlines findings from a survey addressed to measure the quality of life of university students in Cagliari. It focuses on issues related to the process of building up of a synthetic indicator of students' quality of life from responses to a set of subjective indicators all measured on ordered scale. The aim has been pursued by adopting the modeling approach of the Item Response Models which enable us to simultaneously summarize student's multiple responses in a metrical measure of the latent trait and to assess the properties of each indicator in terms of the location of its parameters on the latent trait and its capability to discriminate across students. A comparison analysis with other classical scaling procedures to summarize multiple indicators in a single statement has been carried out with the main aim to assess the potential of the Item Response Models approach in terms of capability to detect pattern of responses which signal a different intensity of the latent trait.