Plain English Summary

The purpose of this project is to find out whether existing questionnaires that are used to measure the health of children and teenagers are appropriate. This project will assess three questionnaires that can be used to measure health of children and teenagers. These measures can be used to inform economic evaluations, that compares both the costs and benefits of different treatments to inform UK healthcare funding decisions. These three questionnaires are being answered by children, teenagers and their parents on their behalf, but the questionnaires have never been formally tested to check whether they are ‘relevant’ (ask about aspects of health and with answers that are appropriate), ‘comprehensive’ (ask about all aspects of health that are important) and comprehensible (the questions and anwers are easy to understand and are interpreted in the way intended). We are interviewing 49 people using online interviews, including children, teenagers and parents (because some children and teenagers who are sick may not be able to answer questions about their health and their parents may be asked instead). Some of the children and teenagers will have no health conditions and others will have health conditions, and some of the parents will have children with no health conditions and others will have children with health conditions, and these health conditions will include both physical and mental health conditions. We will record the interviews and transcribe the interviews to accurately record everything that was discussed. We will analyse the transcripts of the interviews (report of everything that was said in the interview) to look at the extent to which each of the three questionnaires are appropriate, and whether this is different for different ages of children and teenagers, and for children and teenagers in comparison to parents. The findings of the project will tell us information about whether the questionnaires are appropriate, and if there are aspects where there may be problems we can develop further research on this.