Impact of work and environmental factors on quality of life in community-dwelling spinal cord injury individuals in South Korea using latent profile analysis.

Objective: To classify Koreans with spinal cord injury into groups with similar levels of life satisfaction and analyse the differences in life satisfaction between the groups, and identify the factors influencing their quality of life.

Design: A cross-sectional study was conducted.

Subjects: The International Spinal Cord Injury Survey of 711 persons with traumatic or non-traumatic spinal cord injury was used.

Methods: The latent profiles were classified according to the sub-items of quality of life, and variables influencing the latent profiles were identified. The Mplus 8.0 program was used for the main analysis. Logistic regression analysis was performed to examine how the predictors were associated with latent profile membership.

Results: The factors associated with a higher likelihood of belonging to the high quality of life group included marital status; having less bowel dysfunction and muscle spasms or spasticity; receiving vocational rehabilitation services and currently engaging in paid work; and negative social attitude and problematic financial status.

Conclusion: Enhancing the quality of life of individuals with spinal cord injury necessitates providing medical care for bowel dysfunction or spasticity, providing vocational rehabilitation services, enabling successful return to work, improving negative perceptions regarding people with disabilities, and implementing policies to guarantee them an income.