QUOKKA Paediatric Multi Instrument Comparison (P-MIC) Study

Overview

What is the Quality of kids’ lives study?

The QUOKKA Paediatric Multi Instrument Comparison (P-MIC) Study, also known as the Quality of kids’ lives study, aims to find out the best way to measure health in kids. This may help to provide better tests, treatments and services to children in the future.

Each year, researchers and doctors work to find better tests, treatments and services for children. They often use questionnaires that ask about a child’s general health to understand how these tests, treatments and services improve children’s lives.

However, this can be hard as they don’t know which questionnaires will do a good job of measuring the health of children. To find out the best way to measure health in kids, this study compares lots of different questionnaires that aim to measure the health of children, sometimes called a Health Related Quality of Life or HRQoL questionnaire.

Visit our study website

Our approach

This study aims to compare common questionnaires used to measure health in children to determine which questionnaires we should be using to evaluate the performance of health interventions. This is the first study globally to compare common questionnaires head-to-head in one large sample of children.

We hope to learn which questionnaires should be used to judge the effectiveness and cost effectiveness of child health interventions.

What will the study test?

This study will test following questionnaires: 

• Global Health Measure
• Child Health Utility (CHU9D)
• Pediatric Quality of Life Inventory (PedsQL)
• EQ-5D-Y (3L and 5L)
• EQ-5D-5L
• EQ-TIPs (previously known as TANDI)
• EQ Health and Wellbeing (EQ-HWB-S)
• Assessment of Quality of Life 6D (AQoL-6D)
• Patient-Reported Outcome Measurement Information System 25 (PROMIS-25)
• Health Utilities Index 2 and 3 (HUI2/3)
• Condition-specific questionnaires 

The study involves an initial and follow-up survey, where Australian children or their caregivers are asked to complete these questionnaires. The performance of these various questionnaires will be analysed and compared. 

We’ll also look at a subset of condition groups to see how generic questionnaires perform compared with condition-specific questionnaires. So far, we’ve collected data on 7,226 Australian children, from children who are well through to those that are very sick. 

A study protocol and technical methods paper have been published. For further information on how this study was conducted, you may wish to review these documents. 

Why is the study important?

Although previous studies have assessed the performance of these questionnaires, these studies often only assess the performance of questionnaires in a specific age group or child condition group (e.g., children aged from 3 to 7 with asthma). This makes it hard to compare the performance of questionnaires to one another because they have often been assessed in very different samples of children. 

This study is unique because it collects all common questionnaires that aim to measure the health of children head-to-head in a large diverse sample of Australian children. The sample for this study includes a wide range of child ages and child health conditions. 

What does this study hope to achieve?

The results from this study will provide information on the performance of these questionnaires that are generalisable to the Australian population and allow for exploration of important subgroups, such as child age and health condition. 

Additionally, this study will provide government, health practitioners and researchers with practical guidance regarding which questionnaires should be used for judging the effectiveness and cost effectiveness of child health interventions. This project is part of a wider research program called the QUOKKA Research Program (QUality OF Life in Kids: Key evidence to strengthen decisions in Australia).

Our impact and achievements

• 7,226 Australian children aged 2 to 18 years have participated in the study.
• Specific sub-samples, representing more than nine child health conditions, have been recruited into the study.
• A technical methods paper and protocol paper, describing the methods of the study, have been published. 
• Initial results have been presented at a range of international conferences.

Learn more

To read more about our study or to keep up-to-date with any research outputs, please see our study website.