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This text describes the data presented in the paper: Measuring quality of life in autistic adults: The reliability and validity of the Brief Version of the World Health Organization Quality of Life scale  

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Introductory information
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Files included in the data deposit (include a short description of what data are contained): 

1) WHOQOL-BREF data for all items (N=26 items) N=351 autistic adults
2)
3)


Explain the relationship between multiple data sets, if required:



Key words used to describe the data: quality of life, autism spectrum disorder, WHOQOL-BREF



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Methodological information
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A brief method description – what the data is, how and why it was collected or created, and how it was processed:

These data are from the ASC-UK autism cohort, collected after participants join the cohort.
Participants complete the measures either on paper, or electronically.
Data are stored on the ASC-UK database, and participants' data was obtained from this database for the study.
Data were processed in the following way: first, expectation-maximisation was used to impute missing values.
Subscales of quality of life were then created as indicated in the WHOQOL-BREF manual (i.e. item-totals for
each subscale were created, then transformed to a 0-100 scale).



Instruments, hardware and software used: 
Instrument: WHOQOL-BREF
Software: data imputation and all analyses except factor analysis were carried out using SPSS; 
Factor analysis was conducted using FACTOR software (http://psico.fcep.urv.es/utilitats/factor/index.html)




Date(s) of data collection: 
July 2015 - September 2016


Geographic coverage of data:
England and Wales


Data validation (how was the data checked, proofed and cleaned):
Data were extracted from the ASC-UK database. This database is set up with a forced numberical entry for each item (i.e. only 1, 2, 3, ,4 or 5 corresponding to the 5-point Likert scale of the WHOQOL-BREF) so anomalous entries (e.g. ‘6’ or ‘9’) are not permitted when entering paper-based questionnaire data (if the questionnaires were completed online, the participant is forced to respond with 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 for each item, or they may leave the item unanswered). Prior to analysis, the data were screened (histograms were plotted for each item, as was the range) to ensure there were no erroneous values. Finally, total number of missing values were calculated for each participant – as only participants with 21 or more items are eligible for the scoring of the WHOQOL-BREF.


Overview of secondary data, if used:
N/A


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Data-specific information
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Definitions of names, labels, acronyms or specialist terminology uses for variables, records and their values: 
Items are numbered 'Q1' through to 'Q26' and correspond to the 26 WHOQOL-BREF items.


Explanation of weighting and grossing variables: 



Outline any missing data:
Items (with N=missing data points): Q3 (N=1), Q4 (N=2), Q6 (N=3), Q7 (N=2), Q8 (N=1), Q9 (N=3), Q12 (N=1), Q13 (N=3), 
Q18 (N=3), Q20 (N=2), Q21 (N=12), Q22 (N=6), Q24 (N=2), Q25 (N=1)


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Contact
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Please contact rdm@ncl.ac.uk for further information