The first AQoL was originally published with 15 items. We have omitted the first 3 questions regarding medicines which have never been scored in the algorithm - only 12 items are supplied in our data collection copy and used in the scoring. We have renamed it AQoL-4D to indicate the 4 dimensions remaining. Each dimension has 3 items.

IMPORTANT NOTE: If you have used the 15 item instrument then question 4 should be named aqol1, question 5 should be named aqol2 and so on to aqol12.

If you have used our 12 item questionnaire, the items should be labelled aqol1, aqol2, aqol3 ... aqol12.

The item responses should be entered as 1, 2, 3 or 4 according to the presentation order in the questionnaire. Each item has 4 response levels.

Note: Missing values – the algorithm allows for only 1 missing value per dimension being imputed from the mean of the other 2 items in the dimension. If more than 1 response is missing in a dimension the respondent's instrument score will not be calculated.

Follow the steps listed below.

Step 1: Right click on this 4D STATA Algorithm File - Select ‘Save Target as...’ or 'Save link As...'

  Choose the location you want to save it, and Save as type ‘All Files’. This will save a STATA ‘.do’ file.

Step 2:  Open your STATA data file containing the AQoL item responses.

If your data is in Excel then select it and open the STATA -> Data Editor - paste the data and save the new STATA file you have created.

Step 3: In STATA, click File -> Do -> and select the file you saved in Step 1 above.

This will produce an output file containing the results of the algorithm and some descriptive statistics.  

Step 4: Finally, please remember that you will need to save the dataset to a new file or overwrite existing file to have the scores available for future use.

Note: If you are experiencing any problem in executing the algorithm please contact the AQoL team.