Measurement of the Quality of Life for Economic Evaluation and the Assessment of Quality of Life (AQoL) Mark 2 Instrument

Abstract

Abstract Including the quality of life in the economic assessment of health and medical services is well established in the literature and a number of multi‐attribute utility (MAU) instruments are available which purport to measure health state utilities. One of these, the Assessment of Quality of Life (AQoL) instrument was developed in Australia and uses Australian importance weights. The present article discusses some of the methodological problems encountered by existing instruments. It outlines the construction of the AQoL Mark 2 and the methodological innovations which have attempted to overcome some of these problems. Technical and other details may be obtained in Richardson et al. (2003a, 2003b, 2003c) and Peacock et al. (2003). These papers may be accessed from the Health Economics Unit web site at 〈 http://heu.buseco.monash.edu.au 〉.