Health-related quality of life and subjective well-being among children aged 9–12 years in Shandong Province, China

Purpose: To investigate the health-related quality of life (HRQoL) and subjective well-being (SWB) of children aged 9–12 years in eastern China, and examine concordance within child self-reported and parent proxy-assessed. Methods: Data was collected from 9 to 12 years old children (including their parents) in Shandong Province in 2018. Participants self-completed a hard-copy questionnaire including Child Health Utility 9D (CHU9D), Pediatric Quality of Life Inventory (PedsQL)™ 4.0 Short Form 15 Generic Core Scales (hereafter the PedsQL™), Student’s Life Satisfaction Scale (SLSS), as well as information on socio-demographic characteristics and self-report health status. Spearman’s correlation coefficients and the difference between sub-groups were conducted to assess and compare the agreement on HRQoL and SWB instruments. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was used to ascertain the number of unique underlying latent factors that were associated with the items covered by the two generic HRQoL and the SWB instruments. The concordance of child self-reported and parent proxy-assessed was analyzed using weighted kappa coefficient and Bland-Altman plots. Results: A total of 810 children and 810 parents were invited to participate in the survey. A valid sample of 799 (98.6%) children and 643 (79.4%) parents completed the questionnaire. The child self-reported mean scores were CHU9D = 0.87, PedsQL™ = 83.47, and SLSS = 30.90, respectively. The parent proxy-assessed mean scores were PedsQL™ = 68.61 and SLSS = 31.23, respectively. The child self-reported PedsQL™ was moderately correlated with the CHU9D (r = 0.52). There was a weak correlation between CHU9D and SLSS (r = 0.27). The EFA result found 3 factors whilst seven SLSS items grouped into a standalone factor (factor 3), and the nine dimensions of CHU9D shared two common factors with the PedsQL™ (factor 1 and factor 2). A low level of concordance was observed across all comparisons and in all domains (weighted kappa < 0.20) between parents and their children. Furthermore, a high level of discordance was observed between child self-reported and father proxy-assessed. Conclusions: CHU9D and PedsQL™ instruments have a higher agreement in measuring the HRQoL in children. CHU9D/PedsQL™ and SLSS instruments showed a low agreement and EFA result suggested that measuring SWB in children potentially may provide further information, which might be overlooked by using HRQoL instruments exclusively. Concordance of child self-reported and parent proxy-assessed was poor. Overall, mother-child concordance was higher than father-child concordance.