Construction and Validation of Composite Quality of Life Indices for Tea Garden Workers in Sivasagar District, Assam

Background: This research is an initial effort to construct and validate composite indices designed specifically for measuring the Quality of Life (QoL) of marginalised tea garden workers with reference to Sivasagar district of Assam. Addressing the drawback of generic assessment tools like WHOQOL-BREF in capturing ground realities, the study develops context-specific measures that reflect the socio-economic and living conditions of tea plantation communities. Methods: The study is based on primary data collected using a structured schedule from 1332 tea garden workers across 28 tea estates of Sivasagar district using Proportionate Stratified Sampling and Simple Random Sampling techniques. QoL has been assessed by using both objective and subjective variables. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) has been applied separately to construct Objective and Subjective QoL indices, which has been further validated using Cronbach’s Alpha, Average Variance Extracted (AVE) and Composite Reliability (CR). Result: The findings of the PCA results revealed KMO measure of sampling adequacy values to be 0.799 and 0.802 for both objective and subjective approaches. Five objective and seven subjective components were extracted, which explained nearly 75% and 86% of the total variance respectively. The constructed and statistically validated composite indices yielded higher explanatory power than WHOQOL-based domains, showing their suitability in assessing the multidimensional QoL of tea garden workers.