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 one response is missing in a dimension, the respondent’s instrument score will not be calculated.
If your data file is in Excel, Access or STATA format, you need to convert it into SPSS by opening SPSS and choosing File -> Open -> Data and then select your data file.
Step 1: Open your SPSS data file containing the AQoL data.
Choose the location you want to save it, and Save as type ‘All Files’. This will save as a ‘.sps’ file.
This will produce an output file containing the results of the algorithm and some descriptive statistics. In your data file there will now new variables - five dimension scores followed by the overall instrument score. |
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