[The validity and reliability of the Turkish Pediatric Quality of Life Inventory for children 13-18 years old].

OBJECTIVE The Pediatric Quality of Life Inventory (PedsQL) is a modular instrument that measures health related quality of life, and investigates the physical and psychosocial functioning, unrelated to health, of children 2-18 years old. In this study, the objective was to evaluate the validity and reliability of the Turkish PedsQL in adolescents 13-18 years old. METHOD The study included 230 adolescents and 230 parents. The subjects were separated into 3 groups: 1. Healthy; 2. Has an acute disease; 3. Has a chronic disease. The reliability and the validity of PedsQL were computed. RESULTS The internal consistency of the scale (Cronbach's alpha coefficient) was 0.82 for the child self-report and 0.87 for the parent proxy report. The PedsQL scores of both the child self-report and parent proxy report showed a statistically significant low to medium level of inversely proportional correlation with many indicators of morbidity and illness burden. There was a statistically significant and direct proportional correlation between the child self-report and parent proxy report scores. CONCLUSION The PedsQL is valid and reliable for evaluating the quality of life of Turkish adolescents 13-18 years old.