Patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) are assessments of health status from the patient's perspective. The systematic and routine collection and use of PROMs in healthcare settings adds value in several ways, including quality improvement and service evaluation. We address the issue of instrument selection for use in primary and/or community settings. Specifically, from the large number of ...

The Penn State Worry Questionnaire for Children (PSWQ-C; Chorpita, Tracey, Brown, Collica, & Barlow, 1997) is a 14-item self-report measure of worry in children and adolescents. Although the PSWQ-C has demonstrated favorable psychometric properties in small clinical and large community samples, this study represents the first psychometric evaluation of the PSWQ-C in a large clinical sample (N =...

An extensive list of published and unpublished instruments used to investigate or evaluate sleep issues in children was collected and assessed based on the fundamental operational principles of instrument development (11 steps). Of all the available tools identified, only a few were validated and standardized using appropriate psychometric criteria. In fact, only 2 fulfill all desirable criteri...

Introduction Once treatment has been initiated with a child victim, the periodic assessment of the client’s psychological and social functioning — including a final assessment at the end of treatment — becomes an important aspect of ongoing clinical care. Whenever possible, such an assessment process should be formal (that is, psychometric) in nature, although less formal inquiries (for example...

There is a major need for an empirical evaluation of classification criteria for somatoform disorders. The present study analyzes psychometric properties of the existing criteria for somatization disorder. The full sample consisted of 324 patients seeking help because of "psychosomatic problems." Data from a subsample of carefully diagnosed patients with somatization syndrome (n = 76) and a cli...

Reliable measures of Medicare beneficiaries' program knowledge are necessary for credible program monitoring, evaluation, and public accountability. This study developed and evaluated the psychometric properties of two possible measures of beneficiary knowledge. One measure was based on self-reported knowledge, the other was a true/false quiz which requires beneficiaries to demonstrate their kn...

Many patients are left with psychological symptoms after surgery for a ruptured intracranial aneurysm. Often the reason for these symptoms is not clear. A prospective study was carried out of 27 patients who were in a good (Grade 1 or 2) condition before operation to identify the origin of such symptoms and discover whether the basic techniques of aneurysm surgery could lead to serious psycholo...

BACKGROUND Ulcerative colitis disease activity indices have not been formally validated. AIM To analise quantitatively the psychometric and performance validity of two non-endoscopic indices for ulcerative colitis, the Simple Clinical Colitis Activity Index and the Seo Index. METHODS In 66 patients with ulcerative colitis, the measurement of disease activity was repeated with the two non-en...

Questionnaires are one of the foundations of psychometric measurement in clinical psychosomatics. We collected mobile computer-based assessments of psychometric data from more than 7000 patients between January 1995 and December 2002. Our experience has shown that this mobile approach enjoys a high acceptance among patients, is effective and two-thirds cheaper than conventional questionnaires u...

quickpsy is a package to parametrically fit psychometric functions. In comparison with previous R packages, quickpsy was built to easily fit and plot data for multiple groups. Here, we describe the standard parametric model used to fit psychometric functions and the standard estimation of its parameters using maximum likelihood. We also provide examples of usage of quickpsy, including how allow...