Abstract
The objective of the present study was to evaluate the perception of the quality of life (QoL) of Paralympic athletes of athletics and swimming. It was a descriptive and cross-sectional study with 32 Paralympic athlete. To evaluate the QoL, the questionnaire of abbreviated quality of life evaluation of the World Health Organization was used. For the analysis of the data the Shapiro-Wilk test was used; because the data presented non-parametric distribution, the descriptive presentation was adopted in median (Md) and interquartile range (Q1; Q3). To compare QoL according to gender and sponsorship, the Mann-Whitney “U” test was used, and the Kruskal-Wallis test was used to compare the QoL between the level of schooling. There was a lower perception of QoL in the environmental domain and a greater perception in the social domain among the parathletes surveyed. In relation to the most impaired subgroups, the lowest values were found among paratrans with primary and higher levels of schooling presented differences in environmental domains and general QoL, fundamental I with secondary education, only in general and fundamental QoL II with higher education, only in the environmental domain. There were no significant differences in the perception of QoL between Paralympic athlete with and without sponsorship, and between athletics and swimming modalities. It is concluded that Paralympic athletes who have lower level of schooling presented themselves as the groups with lower perceptions of QoL.
Keywords:
Quality of Life; Athletics; Swimming; Paralympic Athletes