Purpose: Health-related quality of life (HRQOL) measures typically do not incorporate patients' preferences for domains such as physical, emotional, functional and social/family well-being, which may compromise precision.
Method: A forced-choice domain-preference measure was developed to assess the importance of HRQOL domains. About 194 cancer patients completed the domain-preference measure, along with measures of HRQOL, coping, adjustment, and life satisfaction.
Results: Patients ranked emotional well-being as most important and the loss of social-family well-being as the most difficult to do without. A weighting algorithm revealed no advantage to incorporating individuals' domain preferences in HRQOL assessment; however, preliminary evidence suggested that HRQOL measurement may be more accurate in predicting outcomes for individuals with no distinct domain preferences than those with distinct preference profiles.
Conclusion: This study provides preliminary evidence for the validity of current measures of HRQOL, which may inherently take into account patients' domain preferences.