Lifestyle Assessment Questionnaire

Cerebral Palsy: (Mackie, Jessen & Jarvis, 1998)

The LAQ-CP is scored out of 100 and can be represented as a percentage with a score of 100% describing a maximally disadvantaged child. A score of 70% would describe a child completing very few self care activities, posing substantial economic burden on their family, and would be in a specialized education setting. A score of 50% would describe a child who would need assistance in many self-care activities, would limit the economic status of their family, and would be receiving educational support. A score of 30% would describe a child who could complete most self care activities without assistance, does not pose an economic burden on their family, and attends mainstream school with little extra assistance.

Cerebral Palsy: (Mackie et al., 1998; n=33, parents of children from the birth cohort of 1964-75 from the North-East England Cerebral Palsy Register) (LAQ-CP)

• Excellent retest correlation after 4 years (r= 0.97, p <0.0001)
• Friedman’s two-way, non-parametric analysis of variance between differences in two individuals’ scores showed no significant variation between the two data sets and large and stable variations between individuals’ first and second scores (X² =0.29, NS)

Concurrent validity

Cerebral Palsy: (Mackie et. al, 1998)

Due to absence of a ‘gold standard’ with regard to children with CP, alternative theoretical construction was used and determined correlation between LAQ-CP score and functional limitation score (r = 0.76, p < 0.0001)

Cerebral Palsy: (Mackie et al., 1998; n=44, from the birth cohort of 1980-85 from the North-East England Cerebral Palsy Register) (LAQ-CP)

• Excellent correlation with the Central Motor Deficit Form (CMDF), a standardized measure for clinical findings in children with cerebral palsy (r = 0.76, p < 0.0001)

Children with Disabilities: (Jessen et al., 2003)

• MCID > 0.5, p = 0.05; with a clinical difference determined to be no less than 0.5 between cases and controls on an item, it was calculated using an alpha level of 0.05, power of 0.9 and a standard deviation of 0.6, that the minimum sample size needed to detect a difference between groups is 33 cases and 33 controls.

Children with Disabilities: (Jessen et al., 2003, n=24 parents)

• Adequate test-retest reliability: Parents completed two questionnaires four to six weeks apart. P values for each item confirmed that none of the differences between controls and case children were statistically significant (p values for all 51 items are >0.24).

Children with Disabilities: (Jessen et al., 2003, n=18 sets of caregiver)

• Adequate Interrater reliability: Two parents each completed a questionnaire. P values confirmed that none of the differences were statistically significant (p values for all 51 items for cases and controls were >0.42)

(McConachie, Colver, Forsyth, Jarvis & Parkinson, 2006)

• Acceptable reports acceptable levels of interrater reliability.

LAQ-G has a Cronbach a value of 0.66 or higher (McConachie et al., 2006).

Children with Disabilities (Jessen et al., 2003)

Predictive Validity:

• Adequate specific patterns with Life Assessment Questionnaire domain scores by diagnostic category can be predicted. For example communication domain will have a higher impact score for children with autism or speech impairments

Concurrent Validity: (n=164 children with disabilities)

• Good case/control comparisons showed that cases scored higher than controls for all except one questionnaire item, and this difference was significant (p < 0.05) for 49 out of the 53 of the questionnaire items. This suggests that the LAQ-G can appropriately discriminate between children with and without disability

Children with Disabilities (Jessen et al., 2003, n=164 children with disabilities)

Discriminant validity:

• Excellent discriminant validity of children with disabilities and control children. For all but one item cases scored higher than controls with p <0.05 for 49 out of 53 items.  

Children with Disabilities (Jessen et al., 2003)

• Good Content Validity of the LAQ-G was determined by a panel of 17 specialists in the fields of pediatrics, child mental health, special education, health services research and social services. These experts reviewed 70 items and provided feedback. Then the authors and two additional professionals reached a consensus on 66 items that were then pilot tested on 16 families. Items that were highly correlated (Kendall’s correlation of 0.8 or higher) were removed.

Children with Disabilities (Jessen, Colver, & Jarvis, 2005)

• Face validity of the LAQ-G was determined by asking parents who have filled out the questionnaires for comments. The LAQ-G manual reports that overall the questions made sense to parents and the face validity appears “reasonable”.