OBJECTIVES: The emerging focus of Singapore's healthcare system on long-term care highlights the need for culturally sensitive Health-Related Quality of Life (HRQOL) instruments to accurately capture the health needs of Singaporeans. Such instruments require a contextualized conceptual framework of health domains. In this study, we developed a comprehensive and culturally-sensitive conceptual framework of health domains relevant to the Singaporean population. METHODS: We recruited Singaporeans/permanent residents, English or Chinese-speaking, with and without chronic illnesses to participate in focus group discussions (FGDs) and in-depth interviews. We elicited what areas of health participants perceived to be important for them to be happy and satisfied with life. To encourage a spontaneous emergence of themes, the standardized moderator guides did not specify any aspect of health as a focus of discussion. We also recruited healthcare workers, viewed as patient-proxies, to participate in separate FGDs. Themes from the transcripts were first distilled through open coding (2 independent coders) then classified into more abstract domains (each transcript coded independently by 2 coders from a pool of 5 coders) using Nvivo10 software. RESULTS: