Development of a health-related quality of life instrument for children: The Quality of Life Questionnaire for Children

Developed a generic self-report and parent-report health-related quality of life instrument: the Quality of Life Questionnaire for Children (QLQC). One hundred and thirty-nine 8- to 12-year old children with congenital gastro-intestinal anomalies and a matched comparison group of 136 children from the general population participated. The QLQC has 118 items, 13 scales, covering the physical, psychological, and social functioning domains of children. Cronbach's alphas of the scales ranged from 0.36 to 0.91 and test-retest correlations from 0.36 to 0.89. On the QLQC, study group children showed more physical problems (p=0.002 to 0.011) and more cognitive problems (p=0.015 to 0.039) than comparison group children. The QLQC discriminated well between children with and without emotional and behavioural problems. QLQC scales showed high correlations with comparable scales of concurrent instruments. It can be concluded that the psychometric properties of the QLQC are promising but that further research is needed.