This file analyses AQoL-6D instrument data (from the general public) and produces a utility score for the instrument overall and a score for each dimension.

Missing values: Note that missing values are represented by a blank and are handled by imputing values within each dimension.

Step 1: Open your STATA data file containing the AQoL item responses.  (For each item, the first response should have been  entered as 1, the second as 2, etc.)

The variable names for item responses in your data need to be as follows: aqol1 – aqol20

For example you may have named the heading for question 1 responses as ‘Q1’ or ‘1’  or ‘AQoL 1’, etc. These need to be changed to aqol1, aqol2, etc.

In STATA you can change variable names by typing the following command in the command window. This can be done as follows for EACH variable:

rename oldvariablename aqol1
rename oldvariablename aqol2
etc

Step 2:  Right click on this 6D STATA Algorithm File - Select ‘Save Target as...’ or 'Save Link as...'

Choose the location you want to save it and Save as type ‘All Files’. This will save a STATA ‘.do’ file.

Step 3: In STATA, go to File -> Do -> and select the file you saved in Step 2 above.

This will produce an output file containing the results of the algorithm and some descriptive statistics. The final column will be the AQoL score. New variables for dimension scores and overall score with labels will be constructed. All the scores are tabulated and summarised as results of the program execution. 

Step 4: Finally, please remember that you will need to save the dataset to a new file or overwrite existing file to have the scores available for future use.

If your data is in Excel then select it and open the STATA -> Data Editor - paste the data and save the new STATA file you have created.

Then shut down the Data Editor sheet and follow the steps listed above.

Note: If you are experiencing any problem in executing the algorithm please contact the AQoL team.