Recently, new patient-oriented outcome measures have emerged in mental health research and practice. Among these, generic quality of life (GQoL) has gained a central place and has come to represent a valid endpoint in most settings, from basic care programs to clinical trials, especially for the field of intellectual disability (ID). However, most studies still refer to health-related QoL, and the tools for the assessment of GQoL present many issues related to the structure complexity and administration time.

The purposes is to evaluate psychometric properties of a new rapid tool for the GQoL assessment named QuIQ (quick instrument for quality of life), originally constructed for use for people with ID.

Two hundred and ten persons with ID were consecutively administered with the QuIQ. A part of them were also assessed with the BASIQ, the Italian adaptation of the quality of life instrument package. QuIQ has the same conceptual framework and refers to the same areas of the BASIQ, but include a low number of dimensions (only attribution of importance and perception of satisfaction) and a factor way of score attribution such as visual analogue scale and graphic geometrical mean calculation.

QuIQ showed good internal coherence (Cronbach's α=0.92), inter-rater reliability (Cohen's K>0.93), and concurrent validity (>0.8) with BASIQ.

These findings seem to display for the QuIQ good psychometric characteristics. They also suggest that it could be possible to apply rapid QoL assessment to all the range of people with ID. This could have very important implications for future massive use in different settings.