Medical Outcomes Study Short Form-36 (SF-36) and the World Health Organization Quality of Life (WHOQoL) Assessment: Reporting of Psychometric Validity Evidence

Abstract

More emphasis has been placed on the inclusion of patients’ perspectives in the assessment of outcomes and treatment effects in medicine and health care via the use of psychometric patient-reported outcome (PRO) instruments. In this study, we examined the reporting of the validity evidence for the SF-36 and the World Health Organization Quality of Life (WHOQoL) Assessment, two commonly used psychometric PRO instruments. Searches were conducted on PubMed, PsycINFO, CINAHL, and EMBASE in January 2013. Thirty randomly selected empirical articles (15 each for the SF-36 and WHOQoL) were included in the present analysis. We found that researchers conducting validation studies on the SF-36 and WHOQoL report a wide variety of validity evidence and are not relying on only one source of validity evidence at the exclusion of all others. Although the SF-36 and WHOQoL both possess evidence to support their score inferences, certain sources of evidence that are emerging as central to the validity claim (e.g., response processes, consequences) have yet to be examined.