Compare methods

	DEMQOL Dementia Quality of Life Measure	Zarit Caregiver Burden Interview
Field	Social Gerontology	Nursing
Family	Latent structure	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2005	1980
Originator	Sarah C. Smith, Donna L. Lamping, Sube Banerjee & colleagues	Steven H. Zarit
Type	Self- and proxy-report health-related quality-of-life measure for dementia	Caregiver self-report interview
Seminal source	Smith, S. C., Lamping, D. L., Banerjee, S., Harwood, R., Foley, B., Smith, P., ... & Knapp, M. (2005). Measurement of health-related quality of life for people with dementia: development of a new instrument (DEMQOL) and an evaluation of current methodology. Health Technology Assessment, 9(10), 1-93.	Zarit, S. H., Reever, K. E., & Bach-Peterson, J. (1980). Relatives of the impaired elderly: Correlates of feeling burdened. Gerontologist, 20(6), 649-655.
Aliases	DEMQOL, DEMQOL-Proxy, Dementia Quality of Life Measure, DEMQOL System	ZBI, Zarit Burden Interview, Caregiver Burden Scale
Related	3	3
Summary	DEMQOL is a measurement system for assessing health-related quality of life in people with dementia, capturing how the condition affects emotional well-being, cognition, and daily living. Developed by Sarah Smith, Donna Lamping, Sube Banerjee, and colleagues and published in 2005 in Health Technology Assessment, it was created to fill the lack of a rigorously developed, dementia-specific quality-of-life instrument and to evaluate the methodology of existing measures. The system has two complementary versions: DEMQOL, a 28-item interviewer-administered self-report completed by the person with dementia, and DEMQOL-Proxy, a 31-item version completed by a family or professional carer. Items cover domains such as feelings and emotions, memory and cognition, and everyday life, answered on a simple ordinal scale and summed into a quality-of-life score. By providing both a patient and a proxy perspective, the system acknowledges that self-report becomes harder as dementia progresses while still privileging the person's own voice where possible. It has been validated across the severity range and is widely used in dementia research and service evaluation.	The Zarit Caregiver Burden Interview, developed by Steven H. Zarit and colleagues in 1980, is a widely used assessment tool designed to quantify the subjective burden experienced by informal caregivers of persons with dementia or other chronic illnesses. The 22-item instrument measures emotional, financial, and physical strain related to caregiving and has become a standard in geriatric, gerontology, neurology, and behavioral health settings worldwide.