Table 7 Administration of SEIQoL-DW

Applying the SEIQoL-DW (Hickey et al 1996) [18]

The SEIQoL-DW is administered in a standardised semi-structured interview in three steps.

(1) Cue elicitation-“What are the five most important aspects of your life at the moment?” The individual is asked to name the five areas of life (cues) which are most important to the overall quality of his or her life.

(2) Determining current status on each cue-“How would you rate yourself on each of these areas at the moment, on a scale from the worst possible to the best possible?” The respondent rates current status against a vertical visual analogue scale labelled at the upper extremity by “as good as could possibly be” and at the lower extremity by “as bad as could possibly be.” These ratings are recorded in the form of a bar chart. The possible score range for each cue level is 0 to 100.

(3) Quantification of relative weighting of each cue-“How do the five areas compare in importance to each other?” This final step involves quantifying the relative contribution of each elicited cue to the judgment of overall quality of life using the direct weighting instrument described above. The total value of all five weights sums to 100.

The SEIQoL-DW allows measurement of quality of life to be completely individualised.

To present information as grouped data, for making group comparisons, it is possible to derive a single index from the data-the global quality of life score. This is calculated by multiplying the individual’s current self-rating on each cue by the corresponding cue weight and summing the products across the five cues. This global quality of life score can range from 0 to 100; it is a continuous measure which can be subjected to parametric statistical analyses