URL:

http://www.rand.org/health/surveys.html

Description:

This site, created by RAND Health, focuses on a wide variety of disease, quality of care and quality of life measures assessing both clinician and patient interactions and features instruments to measure cost-effectiveness and social support scales. While the bulk of the instruments focus on patient outcome and patient quality of life, the site offers both nurse and physician peer reviews and an instrument concentrated on the use of pesticides in the Gulf War.

Types of Information or Instruments:

The site offers a list of instruments on a vast array of subjects, ranging from patient-oriented disease-specific quality of life scales to quality of care and Physician Peer Reviews. It offers numerous scales from the Medical Outcomes Study, with emphasis on patient adherence, mental health and sexual problems. The site also provides 2 instruments used to measure quality of life and other areas for patients with HIV. The HIV Patient Assessed Report of Status and Experience (HIV-PARSE) was designed to gauge patient outcomes in clinical tests for those infected with HIV. The HIV Cost and Services Utilization Study includes multi-item measures to assess quality of life for HIV patients.

Quantity of Instruments:

Rand Health lists 35 instruments, most with a detailed description.

Quality of Instrument Descriptions:

The RAND webpage lists the applicable instruments and provides links to their descriptions, either within the RAND site or to an external site. The instrument descriptions vary. Although the greater part of the instruments have detailed descriptions, with information about the developer, studies the instrument was tailored for and utilized in, and references, there are a small number of instruments with very brief summaries. In the majority of the detailed descriptions, there are descriptions on how the survey is structured and usually administered, and information on how to use each instrument.

Quality of Psychometric Information:

Most items on the site offer a reference section that details in part some of the scale’s psychometric information. The website contains charts and links to reliability (Cronbach's alpha, test-retest), validity and normative information (central tendencies and variability).

Scale accessibility:

All of the instruments listed on the RAND Surveys Site are free to the public, and most are available online from the website. A few scales not available online can be obtained by contacting RAND, or the developer at the e-mail listed in the description.

Site provides actual scale items:

The majority of the instruments on the site provide links to actual scale items.

User-friendly navigation:

This site is not extremely user-friendly. While there is a wealth of information on a variety of instruments, searching through the extensive list of un-categorized measures can be cumbersome.

Other types of Information:

More than half of the instruments listed offer links to supplemental texts and/or studies that have used the scale being described.

Hints:

The majority of the scoring information for the instruments on the website can be found under the “Scoring Instructions” PDF file link on the Survey’s main page.

Category:

Disease- and Nondisease-specific Outcomes