338 American Association on Mental Retardation Consumer-Based Quality of Life Assessment: The Maryland Ask Me! Project

The concept of quality of life currently impacts program development, service delivery, manage-ment strategies, and outcome evaluation in the area of intellectual disabilities. Maryland uses peer interviewers to assess consumer-perceived quality of life among adult recipients of MR/DD services and supports. In this article we describe the survey instrument and procedures and discuss assess-ment issues of quality of responses, acquiescence, and proxy respondents. We present the psycho-metric properties for eight core quality of life domains among 923 people assessed in FY 2001. Results are summarized and development of a model for enhancing social inclusion, personal de-velopment, and self-determination was described. Service and personal characteristics relating to quality of life as well as some ways the results can be used for program enhancement are discussed. The concept of quality of life is currently im-pacting program development, service delivery, management strategies, and outcome evaluation in a number of human service areas, including intel-lectual and developmental disabilities. Advances during the last decade in understanding the concept of quality of life have occurred simultaneously with the emergence of participatory action research, which involves the active role of consumers in eval-uation and research activities. Conceptually, we currently understand three important aspects about the quality of life construct. First, it is multidimensional and includes a number of domains of personal well-being. The present study is based on eight core domains that have been identified in the international quality of life litera