Background
Mental health symptoms affect children and youths’ functioning, quality of life (QOL), and well-being in daily life. While this ‘life impact’ is a critical outcome, there is a lack of conceptual clarity and widely endorsed outcome measurement instruments (OMI) to support consistent assessment across studies. This scoping umbrella review sought to map OMIs that assess life impact through measures of functioning, QOL, or well-being. Specifically, our aims were to: identify life impact OMIs from existing reviews, compare OMI design characteristics, descriptively appraise essential aspects of development quality for selected OMIs, and assess how consistently reviews identified OMI target constructs.
Methods
We searched six databases for systematic, scoping, rapid, or narrative reviews of functioning, QOL, or well-being OMIs for 6-to-24-year-olds with primary mental health concerns. We separately retrieved original development/validation reports for each OMI and extracted information on the target construct and key design characteristics. For a subset of OMIs, we descriptively appraised essential features of OMI development quality.
Results
We identified 80 OMIs of functioning (n = 35), QOL (n = 33), and well-being (n = 12). Two-thirds were developed for children and youth up to 18 years, but none targeted young adults aged 19–24. Functioning OMIs were frequently designed for multi-informant assessment; QOL and well-being OMIs were mainly self-reported. Most functioning OMIs were originally validated in populations with mental health difficulties, unlike OMIs of QOL and well-being. For over one quarter of OMIs, the target construct was misclassified in at least one review, with frequent conflation of QOL and well-being.
Conclusions
Mental health difficulties impact life across functioning, QOL, and well-being. Life impact is a core outcome to track in clinical research and practice. This review provides a roadmap to selecting OMIs of life impact in youth mental health based on OMI design characteristics.