Quality of life (QoL) assessment in children and adolescents needs to be age-appropriate and to address health-related concerns to identify children and adolescents who are at risk from health problems, and to determine the burden imposed by a particular disease or disability. The KIDSCREEN approach has tackled the challenges of international paediatric QoL research by providing measures that are applicable for children and adolescents as well as their parents and that can be used to monitor and evaluate health-related QoL in public-health surveys, in clinical studies, and in research projects.
The generic KIDSCREEN questionnaires were developed in the context of a European cross-cultural representative health survey in order to be able to compare health-related QoL across different countries and in order to be able to monitor the health status of children and adolescents. The KIDSCREEN group used a simultaneous approach to develop its cross-cultural instrument, which ensures the cross-cultural applicability of the KIDSCREEN measures, making them both conceptually and linguistically appropriate for use in many different countries. The current handbook describes all relevant user information necessary for applying the KIDSCREEN questionnaires, e.g. psychometrics, norm data for group and individual comparisons, and instructions on how to score the instrument and how to interpret the results.

THE KIDSCREEN GROUP EUROPE
Ulrike Ravens-Sieberer, Angela Gosch, Michael Erhart, Ursula von Rueden, Jennifer Nickel, Bärbel-Maria Kurth (co-ordinating centre Germany); Wolfgang Duer, Kristina Fuerth (Austria); Ladislav Czemy (Czech Republic); Pascal Auquier, Marie-Claude Simeoni, Stephane Robitail (France); Yannis Tountas, Christina Dimitrakaki (Greece); Agnes Czimbalmos, Anna Aszmann (Hungary); Jean Kilroe, Celia Keenaghan (Ireland); Jeanet Bruil, Symone Detmar, Eric Verrips (The Netherlands); Joanna Mazur, Ewa Mierzejewska (Poland); Mick Power, Clare Atherton, Katy Phillips (United Kingdom); Luis Rajmil, Silvina Berra, Cristian Tebé, Michael Herdman, Jordi Alonso (Spain); Curt Hagquist (Sweden); Thomas Abel, Bernhard Cloetta, Corinna Bisegger, Claudia Farley (Switzerland); Jacob Bjorner, Stef van Buuren, Michael Rigby, Alan Tennant, John Ware and Elizabeth Waters (Advisory Board)