Experience of Service Questionnaire (ESQ)

Overview

The Experience of Service Questionnaire (ESQ, formerly CHI-ESQ) was developed by the then Commission for Health Improvement (now the Health Care Commission) as a means of measuring service satisfaction in Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services. The CHI-ESQ was originally used as an anonymous measure for one-off audits of service delivery but CORC recommends that it should be used routinely in conjunction with other core measures so that a family’s experiences with the service can be understood alongside the child’s symptom reduction.

The ESQ consists of 12 items and three free text sections looking at what the respondent liked about the service, what they felt needed improving, and any other comments.

Psychometric properties

Property	Definition	ESQ
Reliability	Degree to which respondents in a similar sample had similar scores	No information available at present.
Test-retest reliability	Degree to which the same respondents have the same score after period of time when trait shouldn’t have changed	No information available at present.
Concurrent validity	Correlation of the measure with others measuring the same concept	No information available at present.
Discriminant validity	Lack of correlation with opposite concepts	No information available at present.
Construct validity	Degree to which a test measures what it claims to be measuring	Brown et al. (2014) reported that the ESQ items can be grouped into two underlying constructs: Satisfaction with Care and Satisfaction with the Environment. The Satisfaction with Care scores showed good precision, differentiating well between less satisfied children, young people and parents, while the Satisfaction with Environment construct did not show sufficient measurement precision, and it is therefore not recommended to be used on its own.

Information on the development progress can be found in this Commission for Health Improvement Evaluation Report.

Suitability

Parents/carers and young people aged 9-18 can fill out the ESQ.

Translation

There are no known translations of the ESQ.

Administration

There are three versions of the ESQ:

Further versions of the parent/ carer report have been developed:

Scoring and Interpretation

The ESQ consists of 12 items rated "Certainly True" (= 1 under CORC Snapshot; = 3 under CORC+), "Partly True" (= 2) and "Not True" (= 3 under CORC Snapshot; = 1 under CORC+) and three free-text sections looking at what the respondent liked about the service, what they felt needed improving, and any other comments. The ESQ Addendum consists of three items which are scored in the same way as the ESQ.

The Satisfaction with Care construct can be obtained by adding up items 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 11 and 12, and the Satisfaction with Environment construct can be obtained by adding up items 8, 9 and 10 (Brown at al., 2014). Most ESQ data is now collected and stored in a format where 1 = "Not true", 2 = "Partly true", 3 = "Certainly true", and we therefore suggest converting data to this format (if it isn't already) before calculating the construct scores. This format is consistent with how ESQ data are submitted to the NHS Digital Mental Health Services Data Set (MHSDS).

For those interested in an Item Response Theory (IRT) approach to scoring, please note that to use the Satisfaction with Care conversion table in Brown et al. (2014), the data should be recorded so that 0 = "Not true", 1 = "Partly true" and 2 = "Certainly true".

Terms of use

The ESQ is freely available to use. It is also one of the measures covered by the NHS Digital Copyright Licensing Service.

Working remotely with ESQ

There are three interactive PDF versions of the ESQ:

Further versions of the parent/ carer report have been developed:

To find out more about working with outcome and experience measures remotely, please visit this page.

Further information

Brown, A., Ford, T., Deighton, J. & Wolpert, W. (2014) Satisfaction in Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services. Administration and Policy in Mental Health and Mental Health Services Research. 41 (4), pp. 436-446.

Satisfaction in Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services: Translating Users’ Feedback into Measurement