Children's Quality of Life

What is it about?

This article is about developing and testing a questionnaire for children to complete about their quality of life. The newly developed questionnaire asks children about five areas of well-being; mobility, self-care, doing usual activities, experiencing pain and feeling sad, worried or unhappy. Although the questionnaire needs more development to be suitable for use in research, there were some interesting findings about the youngest ages at which children may respond validly.

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Why is it important?

Quality of life is increasingly used to evaluate health care interventions and in clinical trials. There is a shortage of valid and reliable questionnaires on quality of life for children to use themselves. Therefore research often gathers parent, teacher or clinician views of children's quality of life while the child's voice is not heard directly. Children are a vulnerable group and it is important that their voice is heard. This article explores possible ways of gathering this.