Abstract
Few measures are available to assess the health status of the growing numbers of children who now survive long-term with chronic physical disorders. A Functional Status Measure, FS I, that had considerable promise for measuring individual child health status and characterizing populations was developed in 1978. This paper describes a revised version of that measure. Data were collected using a new sample of 732 children (aged 0 to 16 years) with and without chronic physical conditions in order to assess the psychometric properties of the new instrument. The FS II(R) has both a long (43-item) and a short (14-item) version. The long version has a total score derived from a one factor solution and a two factor solution consisting of General Health and Stage Specific factors for each age group. The 14-item version of FS II(R) uses a common core of items across the entire age span. Internal consistency estimates (alphas) for the factor-based and 14-item versions are all >0.80. At each age, long and short versions behave similarly in a wide range of tests of discriminant, construct, and content validity-strong support that they constitute a common measure. The FS II(R) has excellent psychometric properties and provides concise measures of health status of children spanning the entire childhood age range from 0 to 16 years. It has particular strengths for the measurement of health status of children with chronic physical conditions who are not disabled.
Original language | English (US) |
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Pages (from-to) | 1041-1055 |
Number of pages | 15 |
Journal | Medical Care |
Volume | 28 |
Issue number | 11 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Nov 1990 |
Keywords
- Children
- Functional status
- Functional status of
- Health care
- Health status assessment
- Pediatric
- Pediatric health care
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health