Background

Due to the development of health promotion and prevention, the need for quality-assured measures has steadily increased in recent years. As a result, a broad variety of quality instruments are now available in the German-speaking area. However, there is a lack of setting-specific instruments which take into consideration the primary purposes and conditions of the specific setting. Against this background a procedure for the quality development of health-related programmes in schools (QHPS) was developed as an iterative process.
Methods

The evaluation of the QHPS-procedure was carried out with the help of school health promotion and prevention experts from the accidence insurance of North-Rhine Westphalia and the health insurance of Lower Saxony (n = 14). To examine interrater reliability study participants were asked to assess one health-related programme in pairs with the QHPS-procedure. In addition to percent agreement Cohen’s Kappa coefficients (κ) as a chance-corrected measure of agreement were calculated.
Results

Results reveal a substantial inter-rater reliability (κ ≥ 0.61) across all quality dimensions and study participants (pairs). Greater deviations from substantial agreements (κ ≤ 0.50) can be observed for only 18 % of all coefficients.
Conclusions

The QHPS-procedure represents the first instrument for the quality development of health-related programmes in schools. Study findings point to a good reliability of the instrument and provide an important contribution in the discussion of the (psychometric) quality of quality instruments.