Pediatric
Oral Health-Related Quality of Life
Oral
health-related quality of life (OQOL) concerns the impact of oral
health on the social and psychological well-being and the daily functioning
of children and their families. Although several measures of OQOL
exist for use with adults, there are no comparable measures of children.
This project will develop a set of measures of pediatric oral health-related
quality of life (POQOL), suitable for use with children and adolescents,
that assesses the impact of oral health on both children and their
families. To accomplish this task, the following aims are proposed:
1) Develop, refine and validate a measure of OQOL for use with children
and adolescents; 2) For each of the four age-appropriate versions
of the OQOL instrument, develop a comparable Spanish-language version;
3) Conduct further validation of all English and Spanish instruments
to assess their sensitivity to change over time to responsiveness
to interventions; 4) Combine the POQOL assessment with other clinical,
demographic and psychosocial measures to explore potential sources
of disparities in oral health; and 5) create a short version of the
POQOL measures for screening purposes. Patient focus groups will
aid in item development and pre-testing of measures. Reliability
will be determined through re-testing, and validity by examining
the relationship between POQOL and established measures of pediatric
health and health-related quality of life. Regression analyses will
be used to examine the relationship between POQOL, psychosocial factors
and oral health disparities in children. The resulting POQOL measures
will be used in analyses of data collected by other projects in this
Program Proposal, and more generally can be used to assess oral quality
of life in population surveys, as outcome measures in clinical trials,
and in clinical practice to evaluate the impact of interventions.
