A self-report inventory is a type of psychological test in which a person fills out a survey or questionnaire with or without the help of an investigator. Self-report inventories often ask direct questions about personal interests, values, symptoms, behaviors, and traits or personality types. Inventories are different from tests in that there is no objectively correct answer; responses are based on opinions and subjective perceptions. Most self-report inventories are brief and can be taken or administered within five to 15 minutes, although some, such as the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), can take several hours to fully complete. They are popular because they can be inexpensive to give and to score, and their scores can often show good reliability.
A patient-reported outcome (PRO) is a health outcome directly reported by the patient who experienced it. It stands in contrast to an outcome reported by someone else, such as a physician-reported outcome, a nurse-reported outcome, and so on. PRO methods, such as questionnaires, are used in clinical trials or other clinical settings, to help better understand a treatment's efficacy or effectiveness. The use of digitized PROs, or electronic patient-reported outcomes (ePROs), is on the rise in today's health research setting.
The Symptom Checklist-90-R (SCL-90-R) is a relatively brief self-report psychometric instrument (questionnaire) published by the Clinical Assessment division of the Pearson Assessment & Information group. It is designed to evaluate a broad range of psychological problems and symptoms of psychopathology. It is also used in measuring the progress and outcome of psychiatric and psychological treatments or for research purposes.
Michael J. Lambert is an American psychologist, professor, researcher, and author whose work in psychotherapy led to the development of Routine Outcome Monitoring, which involves regularly measuring and monitoring client progress with standardized self-report scales throughout the course of treatment. Lambert and colleague Gary Burlingame are recognized as experts in psychotherapy outcome measurement research.
The Eating Disorder Inventory (EDI) is a self-report questionnaire used to assess the presence of eating disorders, (a) anorexia nervosa both restricting and binge-eating/purging type; (b) bulimia nervosa; and (c) eating disorder not otherwise specified including binge eating disorder. The original questionnaire consisted of 64 questions, divided into eight subscales. It was created in 1984 by David M. Garner and others. There have been two subsequent revisions by Garner: the Eating Disorder Inventory-2 (EDI-2) and the Eating Disorder Inventory-3 (EDI-3).
The Youth Outcome Questionnaire is a collection of questions designed to collect data regarding the effectiveness of youth therapies. The Y-OQ is a parent report measure of treatment progress for children and adolescents receiving mental health interventions. The Y-OQ–SR is an adolescent self report measure appropriate for ages 12 – 18.
The Health Dynamics Inventory (HDI) is a 50 item self-report questionnaire developed to evaluate mental health functioning and change over time and treatment. The HDI was written to evaluate the three aspects of mental disorders as described in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM): "clinically significant behavioral or psychological syndrome or pattern...associated with present distress...or disability". This also corresponds to the phase model described by Howard and colleagues Accordingly, the HDI assesses (1) the experience of emotional or behavioral symptoms that define mental illness, such as dysphoria, worry, angry outbursts, low self-esteem, or excessive drinking, (2) the level of emotional distress related to these symptoms, and (3) the impairment or problems fulfilling the major roles of one's life.
PTSD Symptom Scale – Self-Report Version (PSS-SR) is a 17-item self-reported questionnaire to assess symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder. Each of the 17 items describe PTSD symptoms which respondents rate in terms of their frequency or severity using a Likert-type scale ranging from 0 to 3. Ratings on items are summed to create three subscales, including re-experiencing, avoidance, and arousal, as well as a total score. All items of the PSS-SR should be answered and assessment is done by total score. The total score higher than 13 indicates on likelihood of PTSD.
The Panic Disorder Severity Scale(PDSS) is a questionnaire developed for measuring the severity of panic disorder. The clinician-administered PDSS is intended to assess severity and considered a reliable tool for monitoring of treatment outcome. Self-report form of the Panic Disorder Severity Scale (PDSS-SR) is used to detect possible symptoms of panic disorder, and suggest the need for a formal diagnostic assessment.
The Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System (PROMIS) provides clinicians and researchers access to reliable, valid, and flexible measures of health status that assess physical, mental, and social well–being from the patient perspective. PROMIS measures are standardized, allowing for assessment of many patient-reported outcome domains—including pain, fatigue, emotional distress, physical functioning and social role participation—based on common metrics that allow for comparisons across domains, across chronic diseases, and with the general population. Further, PROMIS tools allow for computer adaptive testing, efficiently achieving precise measurement of health status domains with few items. There are PROMIS measures for both adults and children. PROMIS was established in 2004 with funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as one of the initiatives of the NIH Roadmap for Medical Research.
The Quality of Well-Being Scale (QWB) is a general health quality of life questionnaire which measures overall status and well-being over the previous three days in four areas: physical activities, social activities, mobility, and symptom/problem complexes.
The Vanderbilt ADHD Diagnostic Rating Scale (VADRS) is a psychological assessment tool for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms and their effects on behavior and academic performance in children ages 6–12. This measure was developed by Mark Wolraich at the Oklahoma Health Sciences Center and includes items related to oppositional defiant disorder, conduct disorder, anxiety, and depression, disorders often comorbid with ADHD.
The Pediatric Symptom Checklist (PSC) is a 35-item parent-report questionnaire designed to identify children with difficulties in psychosocial functioning. Its primary purpose is to alert pediatricians at an early point about which children would benefit from further assessment. A positive result on the overall scale indicates that the child in question would benefit from further evaluation. It is not a diagnostic tool. The PSC has subscales which measure inner distress and mood, interpersonal relations and behavior, and attention. The PSC is also used in pediatrics and other settings to measure changes in psychosocial functioning over time. Michael Jellinek, MD, created the PSC and has researched it over more than thirty years in collaboration with J. Michael Murphy, Ed.D. and other investigators. The PSC has been used in more than 200 studies in the US and other countries and has been endorsed by the American Academy of Pediatrics, the state of Massachusetts, the government of Chile and many other organizations.
The Dimensional Obsessive-Compulsive Scale (DOCS) is a 20-item self-report instrument that assesses the severity of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) symptoms along four empirically supported theme-based dimensions: (a) contamination, (b) responsibility for harm and mistakes, (c) incompleteness/symmetry, and (d) unacceptable (taboo) thoughts. The scale was developed in 2010 by a team of experts on OCD led by Jonathan Abramowitz, PhD to improve upon existing OCD measures and advance the assessment and understanding of OCD. The DOCS contains four subscales that have been shown to have good reliability, validity, diagnostic sensitivity, and sensitivity to treatment effects in a variety of settings cross-culturally and in different languages. As such, the DOCS meets the needs of clinicians and researchers who wish to measure current OCD symptoms or assess changes in symptoms over time.
The FACT-G is a patient-reported outcome measure used to assess health-related quality of life in patients undergoing cancer therapy. The FACT-G is the original questionnaire that led to the development of the larger Functional Assessment of Chronic Illness Therapy (FACIT) collection of quality of life instruments. The survey assesses the impacts of cancer therapy in four domains: physical, social/family, emotional, and functional. The FACT-G is also offered with additional questions measuring cancer-specific factors that may affect quality of life, leading to the creation of the Functional Assessment of Cancer Therapy - Head and Neck (FACT-H&N), the Functional Assessment of Cancer Therapy - Lung (FACT-L), and 18 others.
The PHQ-9 is a 9-question instrument given to patients in a primary care setting to screen for the presence and severity of depression. It is the 9-question depression scale from the Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ). The results of the PHQ-9 may be used to make a depression diagnosis according to DSM-IV criteria and takes less than 3 minutes to complete. The total of all 9 responses from the PHQ-9 aims to predict the presence and severity of depression. Primary care providers frequently use the PHQ-9 to screen for depression in patients.
Impact of Event Scale - Revised (IES-R) is a 22-item self-report measure that assesses subjective distress caused by traumatic events. The 15-item IES is the original scale, but is missing hyperarousal symptom. It is a revised version of the older version, the 15-item IES. The IES-R contains seven additional items related to the hyperarousal symptoms of PTSD, which were not included in the original IES. Items correspond directly to 14 of the 17 DSM-IV symptoms of PTSD. Respondents are asked to identify a specific stressful life event and then indicate how much they were distressed or bothered during the past seven days by each "difficulty" listed.
The Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire(MLQ) is a psychological inventory consisting of 36 items pertaining to leadership styles and 9 items pertaining to leadership outcomes. The MLQ was constructed by Bruce J. Avolio and Bernard M. Bass with the goal to assess a full range of leadership styles. The MLQ is composed of 9 scales that measure three leadership styles: transformational leadership, transactional leadership, and passive/avoidant behavior, and 3 scales that measure outcomes of leadership. The MLQ takes an average of 15 minutes to complete and can be administered to an individual or group. The MLQ can be used to differentiate effective and ineffective leaders at all organizational levels and has been validated across many cultures and types of organizations. It is used for leadership development and research.
The Attribution Questionnaire (AQ) is a 27-item self-report assessment tool designed to measure public stigma towards people with mental illnesses. It assesses emotional reaction and discriminatory responses based on answers to a hypothetical vignette about a man with schizophrenia named Harry. There are several different versions of the vignette that test multiple forms of attribution. Responses assessing stigma towards Harry are in the form of 27 items rated on a Likert scale ranging from 1 to 9. There are 9 subscales within the AQ that breakdown the responses one could have towards a person with mental illness into different categories. The AQ was created in 2003 by Dr. Patrick Corrigan and colleagues and has since been revised into smaller tests because of the complexity and hypothetical that did not capture children and adolescent's stigmas well. The later scales are the Attribution Questionnaire-9 (AQ-9), the revised Attribution Questionnaire (r-AQ), and the children's Attribution Questionnaire (AQ-8-C).
Gary M Burlingame is an American psychologist, Professor of Psychology at Brigham Young University in Utah. His work in psychotherapy led to the development of Routine Outcome Monitoring. With his colleague Michael J. Lambert he co-created Outcome Questionnaire 45, a 45-item multiple-choice self-report inventory used to measure psychotherapy progress in adult patients throughout therapy and following termination.
