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Readability of Commonly Used Quality of Life Outcome Measures for Youth Self-Report

Krause, Karolin R; Jacob, Jenna; Szatmari, Peter; Hayes, Daniel; (2022) Readability of Commonly Used Quality of Life Outcome Measures for Youth Self-Report. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health , 19 (15) , Article 9555. 10.3390/ijerph19159555. Green open access

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Abstract

Self-report measures are central in capturing young people’s perspectives on mental health concerns and treatment outcomes. For children and adolescents to complete such measures meaningfully and independently, the reading difficulty must match their reading ability. Prior research suggests a frequent mismatch for mental health symptom measures. Similar analyses are lacking for measures of Quality of Life (QoL). We analysed the readability of 13 commonly used QoL self-report measures for children and adolescents aged 6 to 18 years by computing five readability formulas and a mean reading age across formulas. Across measures, the mean reading age for item sets was 10.7 years (SD = 1.2). For almost two-thirds of the questionnaires, the required reading age exceeded the minimum age of the target group by at least one year, with an average discrepancy of 3.0 years (SD = 1.2). Questionnaires with matching reading ages primarily targeted adolescents. Our study suggests a frequent mismatch between the reading difficulty of QoL self-report measures for pre-adolescent children and this group’s expected reading ability. Such discrepancies risk undermining the validity of measurement, especially where children also have learning or attention difficulties. Readability should be critically considered in measure development, as one aspect of the content validity of self-report measures for youth.

Type: Article
Title: Readability of Commonly Used Quality of Life Outcome Measures for Youth Self-Report
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.3390/ijerph19159555
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph19159555
Language: English
Additional information: : © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).
Keywords: quality of life; children; youth; adolescents; outcome measures; readability
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Population Health Sciences > Institute of Epidemiology and Health > Behavioural Science and Health
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Population Health Sciences > Institute of Epidemiology and Health
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10153583
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