Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2018 Feb 13;16(1):34.
doi: 10.1186/s12955-018-0858-2.

Assessing the reliability of the short form 12 (SF-12) health survey in adults with mental health conditions: a report from the wellness incentive and navigation (WIN) study

Tianyao Huo  1 , Yi Guo  2 , Elizabeth Shenkman  2 , Keith Muller  2
Affiliations

Assessing the reliability of the short form 12 (SF-12) health survey in adults with mental health conditions: a report from the wellness incentive and navigation (WIN) study

Tianyao Huo et al. Health Qual Life Outcomes. .

Abstract

Background: Although Short Form (SF)-12 × 2® has been extensively studied and used as a valid measure of health-related quality of life in a variety of population groups, no systematic studies have described the reliability of the measure in patients with behavioral conditions or serious mental illness (SMI).

Methods and results: We assessed the internal consistency, split-half reliability and annual test-retest correlations in a sample of 1587 participants with either a combination of physical and behavioral conditions or SMI. The Mosier's alpha was 0.70 for the Physical Composite Scale (PCS) and 0.69 for the Mental Health Composite Scale (MCS), indicating good internal consistency. We observed strong correlations between physical functioning, physical role and body pain scales (r = 0.55-0.56), and between social functioning, emotional role, and mental health (r = 0.53-0.58). We calculated split-half reliabilities to be 0.74 for physical functioning, 0.75 for physical role, 0.73 for emotional role and 0.65 for mental health respectively. We assessed the annual test-retest correlation using intraclass correlation (ICC) and found an ICC of 0.61 for PCS and 0.57 for MCS composite scores, adjusting for age, sex, race/ethnicity, and CRG. We found no decline in the correlations between baseline and the following study years until year 3.

Conclusions: Our results encourage using SF-12v2® to assess health-related quality of life in the Medicaid population with combined physical and behavioral conditions or similar cohorts.

Trial registration: The WIN study was registered with clinicaltrials.gov on April 22, 2015.

Trial registration number: NCT02440906 . Retrospectively registered.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

Ethics approval and consent to participate

The University of Florida Health Science Center Institutional Review Board (IRB) reviewed and approved all materials and protocols under number 168–2012. Informed consent documents were obtained electronically from intervention participants and verbally from the control and comparison participants. This article does not report any individual participant data in any form. The WIN study was registered with clinicaltrials.gov. Retrospectively registered.

Consent for publication

NA

Competing interests

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Publisher’s Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

References

    1. The Lancet D, amp, Endocrinology Poor mental health in diabetes: still a neglected comorbidity. The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology. 2015;3:393. doi: 10.1016/S2213-8587(15)00144-8. - DOI - PubMed
    1. De Hert M, Cohen D, Bobes J, Cetkovich-Bakmas M, Leucht S, Ndetei DM, Newcomer JW, Uwakwe R, Asai I, Moller HJ, et al. Physical illness in patients with severe mental disorders. II. Barriers to care, monitoring and treatment guidelines, plus recommendations at the system and individual level. World Psychiatry. 2011;10:138–151. doi: 10.1002/j.2051-5545.2011.tb00036.x. - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. McNamee L, Mead G, MacGillivray S, Lawrie SM. Schizophrenia, poor physical health and physical activity: evidence-based interventions are required to reduce major health inequalities. Br J Psychiatry. 2013;203:239–241. doi: 10.1192/bjp.bp.112.125070. - DOI - PubMed
    1. Shenkman E, Muller K, Vogel B, Nixon SJ, Wagenaar AC, Case K, Guo Y, Wegman M, Aric J, Stoner D. The wellness incentives and navigation project: design and methods. BMC Health Serv Res. 2015;15:579. doi: 10.1186/s12913-015-1245-x. - DOI - PMC - PubMed
    1. Texas Medicaid and CHIP In Perspective. (The “Pink Book”) 10th Edition edition; 2015.

Publication types