OBJECTIVES: To evaluate the overall performances of generic and disease-specific measures. METHODS: One disease-specific and five generic measures were administered in cataract patients at baseline, 1- and 6-month. The disease-specific measure was the National Eye Institute Visual Functioning Questionnaire-25 (VFQ-25) and the generic measures included the Short Form-6D (SF-6D), EuroQol-5D (EQ-5D), Self-Administered Quality of Well-being Scale (QWB-SA), and two versions of the Health Utilities Index (HUI2 and HUI3). The global rating of change, in a 5-point rating scale, was applied as an anchor and the score change between baseline and 6-month was calculated accordingly. Two definitions for responders who experienced a minimally important difference were used: patients whose global ratings were “somewhat better” or above (Model 1) and patients rated as “somewhat better” or above, or “somewhat worse” or below (Model 2). In Model 2, for the patients who reported “somewhat worse” or below, the sign of the score changes were reversed. In Experiment 1 the performance of the generic measure was compared against the VFQ-25 based on Model 1. In Experiment2 the impact of using different classifications for the responders was examined by comparing the performances of Model 1 and Model 2 for each measure. The performances of the measures were compared based on the areas under the receiver operating characteristics curves. RESULTS: A total of 223 cataract patients were included. In Experiment 1, only the EQ-5D showed significantly lower performance than the VFQ-25 (p<0.0001) and there were no differences between the VFQ-25 and the other generic measures. In Experiment 2, the performances between Model 1 and 2 were not significant in all the measures.  CONCLUSIONS: In this cataract population, we found that the generic measures were as sensitive as the disease-specific measure in most cases and the performance of the measure did not depend on the different definitions for the responder.