Abstract
The functional status of ambulatory patients is an important correlate of their emotional and physical well-being and is subject to influence by the delivery of health care. First, the present study obtains a profile on the FSQ for a large sample of young, healthy adults (N=508 college undergraduates), for use as an “empirical standard” against which to evaluate the effect of disease or injury on an individual's functional status. Second, cross-sectional analyses contrast distributional features of responses to the FSQ between (a) the present younger, healthy sample and (b) a previously published, older ambulatory patient sample. These analyses suggest that the FSQ has acceptable discriminant validity for intergroup comparisons. Finally, confirmatory structural analyses suggest that the theoretical six-factor model hypothesized to underlie responses to the FSQ has a modest, yet acceptable, goodness of fit to actual data.
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This research was supported in part by The Merck Company Foundation through a grant to the National Fund for Medical Education (30188A), by a grant from the National Science Foundation (SES-8822337), and by a grant for Residency Training in General Internal Medicine and/or Pediatrics from the U.S. Public Health Service (1D28PE-15275-01). A preliminary version of this report was presented at the Annual Meeting of the Society of Behavioral Medicine, March–April 1989, in San Francisco. Appreciation is extended to Dr. Lisa V. Rubenstein (Department of Medicine at UCLA Center for the Health Sciences, Los Angeles) for providing us with a copy of and manual for the FSQ, to Julie Smith (Office of Planning and Resource Management, University of Illinois at Chicago) for providing information concerning the demographic attributes of University of Illinois undergraduates over the past decade, to the Computer Center (for computer resources) and the Department of Psychology (for access to the subject pool) of the University of Illinois at Chicago, and to Janet Goranson for preparing the manuscript.
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Yarnold, P.R., Bryant, F.B., Repasy, A.B. et al. The factor structure and cross-sectional distributional properties of the beth Israel/UCLA functional status questionnaire. J Behav Med 14, 141–153 (1991). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00846176
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00846176