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Examining gender-related differential item functioning of the Veterans Rand 12-item Health Survey

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Abstract

Purpose

Previous research suggests that gender differences in patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) may reflect measurement bias rather than true differences in underlying health status. The aim of this study is to examine whether the Veterans Rand 12-item Health Survey (VR-12) allows for unbiased comparisons of physical and mental health scores across gender. The VR-12 is a generic PROM consisting of 12 items with 3–6 response options for the measurement of mental and physical health.

Methods

Study data were from the 2015 Health Outcomes Survey pertaining to the Medicare beneficiaries. A total of 277,518 participants included 116,817 (42.1%) males and 160,701 (57.9%) females. Scale-level and item-level differential functioning methods were applied using multiple-group confirmatory factor analysis and ordinal logistic regression, respectively.

Results

The scale-level differential functioning showed support for strict invariance (RMSEA = 0.045; CFI = 0.995) across gender. Although we found statistically significant differential item functioning for several items, the magnitude was negligible (maximum ΔR 2 = 0.007).

Conclusion

The VR-12 physical and mental health status scores are unbiased with respect to gender.

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Acknowledgements

This research was undertaken, in part, thanks to funding from the Canada Research Chairs program. Dr. Sawatzky holds a Canada Research Chair in Patient-Reported Outcomes.

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Correspondence to Jae Yung Kwon.

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All authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest.

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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. Since this was a retrospective study using publicly available data with a legally designated custodian, the research ethics board provided exemption from seeking formal approval.

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Kwon, J.Y., Sawatzky, R. Examining gender-related differential item functioning of the Veterans Rand 12-item Health Survey. Qual Life Res 26, 2877–2883 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11136-017-1638-x

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