The On-Line Guide to Quality-of-Life Assessment (OLGA): resource for selecting quality of life assessments

The approach taken to assess quality of life depends on both the purpose of measurement and the characteristics of the population being assessed. Measurement strategies differ if the aim is to monitor the population’s level of health, investigate determinants of health, allocate resources or evaluate the impact of different treatment interventions. For either monitoring or epidemiological investigation, a measure that combines both mortality and morbidity, such as quality-adjusted life years, may be the most suitable measure. For resource allocation, measures that include trade-offs between different levels of health-related quality of life are needed. Clinical trials that follow persons over relatively short periods and require detailed information about changes in functioning attributable to the intervention being studied are more likely to require batteries or profiles of health-related quality of life assessments.