Instrument Details
Recall Period
The Anxiety, Anger, Depression, Fatigue, Pain Behavior, Pain Interference, Satisfaction
with Discretionary Social Activities, and Satisfaction with Social Roles item banks
utilize a 7–day recall period (items include the phrase "the past 7 days").
Physical function items emphasize current capabilities and therefore do not employ
a recall period. Those items have stems that begin with phrases such as "Does
your health now limit you" or "Are you able to." Some global health
items use a 7–day recall period, while others do not employ a recall period and
emphasize current status "in general."
Response Options
The term "response options" refers to the set of answers a respondent
can choose from when responding to a question or statement. Virtually all PROMIS®
items employ five response options (e.g., 1=Not at all, 2=A little bit, 3=Somewhat,
4=Quite a bit, 5=Very much). Pain Behavior uses six response options to allow for
respondents to endorse "no pain." The 10 PROMIS® Global
Health items each have 5 response choices, with the exception of the common 11–point
pain intensity item ("How would you rate your pain on average" with 0=No
pain and 10=Worst imaginable pain).
To the extent possible, the wording of response categories was kept consistent within
banks, and a limited degree of variation in response options was used across banks.
This was done to ease patient burden. An effort was made for items within a PROMIS®
domain to utilize the same or a small number of response options. Some flexibility
in response choices within banks was considered important, however, to capture the
range of patient experience in a domain (e.g., intensity, frequency, duration).
Therefore, for example, most banks employed a common set of response options for
intensity (i.e., "Not at all" to "Very much") and frequency
(i.e., "Never" to "Always"). The final response categories were
pre–tested with cognitive interviews to confirm patient comprehension, prior
to field testing for item calibration. When possible, to ease responder burden,
initial short forms developed from PROMIS® item banks comprise items
with a common set of response options. Exceptions are the 10 Global Health items
which utilize 5 unique response options and the Physical Function short form which
uses 2 response options.
Population
As noted in the Calibration Studies Testing section, scale setting
was performed using a sample reflecting year 2000 census demographics data. Many
participants with chronic disease (e.g., cancer, heart disease, arthritis, COPD,
spinal cord injury, psychiatric conditions) were included.