Use of the child health questionnaire in a sample of moderate and low-income inner-city children with asthma

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.