Quality of Life Outcomes in Clinical Trials and Health-Care Evaluation A Practical Guide to Analysis and Interpretation

An essential, up-to-date guide to the design of studies and selection of the correct QoL instruments for observational studies and clinical trials.With the recent attention paid to QoL in clinical trials and observation studies, many new QoL methods have been created. The majority of available QoL books tend to focus on detailed coverage of the design of these new QoL studies. This book differs in that it aims to assist the busy statistician/clinician in selecting the right QoL study methodology, and thus save them time in trial design. Readers are offered a practical guide to the use of already available QoL instruments as opposed to guidance on the designing of specific methods. The book then sets out to assist the reader in the accurate analysis and interpretation of QoL outcomes.It will examine the problems caused by QoL outcomes (which tend to generate data with discrete, skewed and bounded distributions) before presenting conventional methods to tackle such problems (e.g. linear regression). More advanced approaches are then discussed including ordinal regression and computer intensive methods (e.g. bootstrapping).Throughout the text the use of real life case studies and worked examples taken from the Author's own work will illustrate the methods discussed, and exercises and solutions will help further the reader's experience. The book will also detail the use and implementation of the necessary software for statistical analysis, including SPSS, STATA and R. A supplementary website will also provide downloadable data files.

Stephen J. Walters – School of Health and Related Research, University of Sheffield. Dr Walters has had experience both in research and teaching, and is currently the Senior Lecturer in Medical Statistics at Sheffield University. He has conducted numerous grant-funded research projects, and has nearly 150 publications to his name. These include 85 articles in a range of refereed journals, 2 co-authored books, and contributed chapters in three other books.