A small-scale study of the inter-rater and staff:client reliability of the Schalock & Keith (1993) Quality of Life Questionnaire (QOL-Q) was conducted. Whilst the sample size was small and the QOL-Q achieved an acceptable overall level of reliability, the study replicated the pattern of low staff:client concordance and staff overestimation of the independence and autonomy of clients reported by Reiter & Bendov (1996). The results are briefly discussed in the context of the ongoing debate about the utility of proxy response in the literature.