top of page
Search

Child-Mother Agreement in the Health-Related Quality of Life of Children with DLD


Boukouvala M, Hyphantis T, Koullourou I, Tzotzi A, Mitropoulou A, Mantas C, Petrikis P, Serdari A, Siafaka V, Kotsis K. Health-Related Quality of Life in Kindergarten Children with Developmental Language Disorder: Child–Mother Agreement. Behavioral Sciences, 13(12),1017. https://doi.org/10.3390/bs13121017





Key terms that are in this paper

  • HRQoL: it is the short form of the term, Health-related Quality of Life. It measures how having DLD may impact the quality of life of people with DLD.

  • Proxy problem: the use of parent reports to replace children’s self-report. This may result in inaccurate diagnosis or misguided interventions.

  • Child-parent agreement: it measures how much DLD children’s self-reported HRQoL agrees with their parents’ report of HRQoL.


Aim of the paper:

  • DLD children may have different opinions on their quality of life from their parents. Only a few studies have looked at the child-parent agreement on quality of life in children with DLD. This study aims to look at the level of agreement between DLD children’s self-reported quality of life and the quality of life reported by their mothers.


What was found:

  • There was poor agreement between DLD children’s self-reported quality of life and their mother-reported quality of life.

  • Mother-reported quality of life was significantly higher from DLD children’s self-reported quality of life in physical functioning, emotional functioning, social functioning, and school functioning.


What does this mean?

  • Parents may overestimate their DLD children’s physical, emotion, social and school functioning.

  • Using both self-reported and parent reported quality of life could minimise the proxy problem and may also give us a better picture of how DLD affect the life of children with DLD.

  • It is important to get DLD children to tell us about the challenges they face in both clinical and research settings. Knowing what DLD children need can help guide the intervention given to children with DLD.

  • Interventions should also address the functional impact of having DLD, such as impacts on social relationships, emotions, and mental well-being of children with DLD.


Where can I read this paper?

This paper is open access, which means everyone can read it. Please click here to find the full paper: https://doi.org/10.3390/bs13121017.


Research summary written by Shimin Wang

bottom of page