To address this gap, objectives of this paper, as a part of a larger project aimed at developing an evaluative disease-specific measure of quality of life in pediatric IBD [ 16] were to understand: (i) how children understand and make meaning of IBD, and (ii) how IBD affects daily life.
They provide a good overview of the discriminative and evaluative properties of generic and disease specific instruments commonly used in QoL studies.
Ideally, questionnaires which measure health status should be both discriminative (able to distinguish patients with different degrees of disease severity) and evaluative (able to detect within patients changes following therapy).
Each measure is reviewed and evaluated against the evaluative criteria.
That is to say that our concept of disease necessarily involves both biological and evaluative judgments.
"Individuals need evaluative information about others to evaluate themselves".
Assessment of quality of life (QoL) has become increasingly important in health care, particularly as an evaluative method to measure outcomes of the impact of disease and interventions.
The WORC was developed and validated as a self-report evaluative measure of quality of life specific to patients with rotator cuff disease [ 48].
Tarng D C et al. [ 28] reported that the 8-OHdG level of cellular DNA, as an evaluative indicator of oxidative DNA damage in reactive oxygen species-mediated diseases [ 15], is reduced after the vitamin C supplementation for 8 weeks in chronic hemodialysis patients.
The problem for the disease status of alcoholism is that a habitual drinker can be described with such strongly evaluative terms as weak, self-deceiving, selfish, self-destructive, shortsighted, uncaring about other people, and even pathetic.
This field of research could benefit from stronger evaluative designs and knowledge of which outcomes common to a range of networks (ie other than disease-specific patient health outcomes) should be measured.
