CHILD REPORT OF ASTHMA HEALTH STATUS: A COMPARISON OF SURVEY ADMINISTRATION METHODS  Linda Radecki, Lynn M. Olson, Mary Pat Frintner. Department of Research, American Academy of Pediatrics, Elk Grove Village, IL.  Presented at the 2007 Pediatric Academic Societies' Annual Meeting.

Background: Should children be asked to report on their own health status? Limited information exists about child report in general, or how methods used might affect feasibility, reliability and validity.

Objective: Compare alternative methods of collecting health status data from children with asthma: interviewer vs self-administered.

Design/Methods: 270 children completed interviewer- and self-administered versions of the Children's Health Survey for Asthma-Child Version (CHSA-C). The CHSA-C includes 25 core items used to compute 3 scales: Physical Health, Child Activities, and Emotional Health. Higher scale scores indicate better health. Paired t-tests & correlations were used to compare scale scores. We examined reliability for the two data collection methods and correspondence on individual scale items (computed % agreement).

Results: Mean age=12.4 years (range=10-16 years). 58% male; 46% African American; 41% family income <$30,000/year; 53% moderate/severe asthma (parent report). Overall, when interviewers obtained the data, children reported lower scores for both Physical (78.99 vs. 80.96, p<.001) and Emotional Health (80.21 vs. 82.76, p<.001). The same pattern was found across age groups. No variation was found for the Child Activities scale. To further assess administration mode, we examined reliability and level of agreement among individual scale items. Regardless of method, reliability estimates exceeded .70 for all but one scale (interviewer-administered Child Activities). Individual item agreement (within 1 point on a 5 point scale) was > 90% for 24 out of the 25 scale items. Highest agreement (98%) was found for the items "embarrased about using asthma inhaler" and "limited in playing at friends' house."

Conclusions: The method used to obtain questionnaire data from children is a consideration in research & clinical settings. In this report, there was not much difference in child asthma health status scores regardless of whether questions were self-completed or reported to an interviewer. From a clinical perspective the scores may be similar enough to suggest that the use of self-report surveys & checklists during wait time can be an efficient and effective way to collect information from young patients.