To develop age-appropriate extensions of a patient-reported outcome measure for capturing the functional impact of visual impairment on daily activities of children and young people aged 8 up to 18 years.

Questionnaire development and validation study.

Pediatric Ophthalmology departments at Great Ormond Street Hospital and Moorfields Eye Hospital, and, in the final study phase, 20 further UK hospitals. Children and young people (aged 6-19 years) with visual impairment (acuity of the logarithm of the minimum angle of resolution (LogMAR) worse than 0.50 in the better eye) due to any cause but without significant non-ophthalmic impairments. We used our prototype FVQ_CYP for 10-15 year olds as the foundation. Twenty-nine semi-structured interviews confirmed relevance of existing, and identified new, age-specific items. Twenty-eight cognitive interviews captured information regarding comprehensibility and format. The FVQ_Child (8-12 years) and FVQ_Young Person (13-18 years) were evaluated with a national sample of 113 children and 96 young people using Rasch analysis.

Issues emerging from interviews with children and young people were largely congruent with those elicited originally with 10-15 year olds. The 28-item FVQ_Child and 38-item FVQ_Young Person versions have goodness-of-fit statistics within the interval 0.5, 1.5 and person separation values of 5.87 and 6.09 respectively. Twenty-four overlapping “core” items enabled their calibration on the same measurement scale. Correlations with acuity (r = 0.47) demonstrated construct validity.

The FVQ_C and FVQ_Young Person are robust age-appropriate versions of the FVQ_CYP which can be used cross-sectionally or sequentially/longitudinally across the age range of 8 up to 18 years in clinical practice and research.