Recommendations from quality of life scales are not simple

doi:10.1136/bmj.325.7364.599/b

BMJ 2002;325:599 ( 14 September )

Letters

Recommendations from quality of life scales are not simple

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

EDITOR $---$ As someone who is guilty of adding to the large number of disease specific quality of life (QOL) scales, let me adda note of caution to the pleas made by Garratt et al for guidanceand recommendations for the users of these scales $---$ however understandablethat plea is.¹ QOL scales are not like thermometers or spirometers,where the reading is independent of the type ofpatient.

A QOL scale is just a shopping bag of experiences (or questions) that are put together to form a scale, rather like the retailprice index. The retail price index is a shopping bag of goodsfor an "average" shopper, even though most people are not thataverage shopper. The scale value obtained from a QOL scale dependson the overlap between the items in a scale and the patient'sown experience of disease. So, for example, if there is a . . . [Full text of this article]

CiteULike

Complore

Connotea

Del.icio.us Add to Digg

Digg

Technorati What's this?

Quality of life measurement: bibliographic study of patient assessed health outcome measures: Andrew Garratt, Louise Schmidt, Anne Mackintosh, and Ray Fitzpatrick
BMJ 2002 324: 1417. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

This article has been cited by other articles:

Bot, S D M, Terwee, C B, van der Windt, D A W M, Bouter, L M, Dekker, J, de Vet, H C W (2004). Clinimetric evaluation of shoulder disability questionnaires: a systematic review of the literature. Ann Rheum Dis 63: 335-341 [Abstract] [Full text]