Validation of the patient-doctor-relationship Questionnaire (PDRQ-9) in a representative cross-sectional German population survey

Abstract

The patient-doctor relationship (PDR) as perceived by the patient is an important concept in primary care and psychotherapy. The PDR Questionnaire (PDRQ-9) provides a brief measure of the therapeutic aspects of the PDR in primary care. We assessed the internal and external validity of the German version of the PDRQ-9 in a representative crosssectional German population survey that included 2,275 persons aged $14 years who reported consulting with a primary care physician (PCP). The acceptance of the German version of this questionnaire was good. Confirmatory factor analysis demonstrated that the PRDQ-9 was unidimensional. The internal reliability (Cronbach's a) of the total score was.95. The corrected item-total correlations were$.94. The mean satisfaction index of persons with a probable depressive disorder was lower than that of persons without a probable depressive disorder, indicating good discriminative concurrent criterion validity. The correlation coefficient between satisfaction with PDR and satisfaction with pain therapy was r =.51 in 489 persons who reported chronic pain, indicating good convergent validity. Despite the limitation of low variance in the PDRQ-9 total scores, the results indicate that the German version of the PDRQ-9 is a brief questionnaire with good psychometric properties to assess German patients' perceived therapeutic alliance with PCPs in public health research. Copyright: © 2014 Zenger et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.