Correlates of use of health care services by children and adolescents from 11 European countries

Objective: To examine the association between use of health care services and health status, sociodemographic, and health care system characteristics in children and adolescents from 11 European countries. Research Design: Cross-sectional surveys in representative samples included using phone or school-based sampling. Subjects: Children and...

The KIDSCREEN-52 quality of life measure for children and adolescents: Psychometric results from a cross-cultural survey in 13 European countries

Objective: This study assesses the reliability and validity of the European KIDSCREEN-52 generic health-related quality of life (HRQoL) questionnaire for children and adolescents. Research Design: The KIDSCREEN-52, which measures HRQoL in 10 dimensions, was administered to a representative sample of 22,827 children and adolescents (8 to 18 years...

Medico-legal reasoning in disability assessment: A focus group and validation study

Background. Decisions on disability pensions are based, among others, on medical reports. The way these medical assessments are performed is largely unclear. The aim of the study was to determine which grounds are used by social insurance physicians (SIPs) in these assessments and to determine if the identification of these grounds can help...

Katz' ADL index assessed functional performance of Turkish, Moroccan, and Dutch elderly

Background and Objective: We examined the reliability and validity of self-reported limitations encountered in the activities of daily living (ADL) as measure of functional performance, for Turkish, Moroccan, and indigenous Dutch elderly in the Netherlands. Methods: We obtained data on self-reported ADL measured by Katz' ADL index and on five...

Physical activity monitoring in Europe. The European Physical Activity Surveillance System (EUPASS) approach and indicator testing

Objectives: The main objective of this paper is to describe the approach and specific findings of the European Physical Activity Surveillance System (EUPASS) research project. In particular, the analysis presented aims at testing the reliability, comparability and predictive power of different sets of physical activity (PA) indicators. Design:...

Assessing comparability of dressing disability in different countries by response conversion

Background: Comparability of health data is a major challenge within the context of the Health Monitoring Programme of the European Commission. A common problem in surveys is that many variations of essentially the same question exist. Methods: Response conversion is a new method for improving comparability by scaling the data onto a common...

Behavioural problems in children who weigh 1000 g or less at birth in four countries

Background: The increased survival chances of extremely low-birthweight (ELBW) infants (weighing ≤1000 g at birth) has led to concern about their behavioural outcome in childhood. In reports from several countries with different assessments at various ages, investigators have noted a higher frequency of behavioural problems in such infants, but...

The cross-cultural validity of self-reported use of health care: A comparison of survey and registration data

Surveys are often used to obtain data on ethnic differences in health care utilization. This study examines the cross-cultural validity of such data. Survey data were linked to an insurance register, for 3054 residents of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Concordance was estimated using Cohen's kappa statistics (agreement adjusted for chance agreement...

Translation, validation, and norming of the Dutch language version of the SF-36 Health Survey in community and chronic disease populations

The primary objectives of this research were to translate, validate, and generate normative data on the SF-36 Health Survey for use among Dutch- speaking residents of the Netherlands. Translation of the SF-36 into Dutch followed the stepwise, iterative procedures developed by the IQOLA Project. Following extensive pilot testing, the SF-36 was...

The European health potential: What can we learn from each other?

In this paper global differences in health between the 12 countries of the European Union are compared and related to variations in so-called determinants of health, especially socioeconomic and life style factors and characteristics of the health care system in each country. This leads to two main conclusions. The first conclusion is that the...

Epidemiologie van tandcariës in Nederland [Epidemiology of dental caries in the Netherlands]

Both in 6- and 12-year-old Dutch children the prevalence of dental caries has declined remarkably between 1970 and 1985. However, in 6-year-olds the decline terminated after that period, while it continued in the 12-year-olds. In 1986 a national dental survey of the caries prevalence of older age categories was executed. As no comparable caries...