Am. J. Respir. Crit. Care Med.,
Volume 162, Number 4, October 2000, 1215-1221
Use of the Child Health Questionnaire in a
Sample of Moderate and Low-Income Inner-City
Children with Asthma
LINDA
ASMUSSEN,
LYNN M.
OLSON,
EVALYN N.
GRANT,
JEANNE M.
LANDGRAF,
JOANNE
FAGAN,
and
KEVIN B.
WEISS
Department of Practice and Research and the Center for Child Health Research, American Academy of Pediatrics, Elk Grove Village, Illinois;
Center for Health Services Research, Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke's Medical Center, Chicago, Illinois; Department of Immunology and
Microbiology, Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke's Medical Center and Department of Pediatrics, Cook County Children's Hospital,
Chicago, Illinois; and HealthAct, Boston, Massachusetts
The Child Health Questionnaire (CHQ-PF50) is one of several recent efforts to gauge pediatric, health-related quality of life from
the patient's (or parent's) perspective. Although tested extensively with healthy children, more information is needed about
CHQ performance among children with chronic conditions such as
asthma. The current study extends previous work by examining the CHQ's psychometric performance in a sample of children with asthma, overrepresenting those at high risk for poor outcomes. Seventy-four adult caregivers of children with asthma completed the CHQ. Internal consistency reliability was consistently high for
all but one scale. Intraclass correlation coefficients ranged from a
low of 0.37 to a high of 0.84. Tests of validity found CHQ scales
better at distinguishing levels of disease severity as defined by symptom activity than medication use or pulmonary function tests. Performance of the CHQ-PF50 in a sample of low-income to moderate
income inner-city parents of children with asthma presented mixed
results. The instrument addresses a broad range of concepts but
some scales may be more salient than others in assessing health
status of children at highest risk for asthma morbidity. Future efforts must compare condition-specific and generic instruments to
evaluate their relative strengths and weakness, as well as potential
links between them.
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