Encyclopedia of Quality of Life and Well-Being Research

2014 Edition
| Editors: Alex C. Michalos

Transition Questions or Items

Reference work entry
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0753-5_3050
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Definition

Transition questions ask respondents to assess whether they consider their health or functioning to have stayed the same, improved, or worsened compared with a previous time point, often a pre-intervention time point.

Description

Central to the importance of measuring patient-reported outcomes are methods that evaluate changes in health-related status over time. Transition questions do this by directly asking respondents to assess whether they consider their health or functioning to have stayed the same, improved, or worsened compared with a previous time point, as illustrated below:

Thinking of the overall effects that your arthritis may have had on you, how would you describe yourself compared to the last time I interviewed you (month)? Do you feel that you are ‘much better,’ ‘slightly better,’ ‘the same,’ ‘slightly worse’ or ‘much worse’? (Fitzpatrick, Ziebland, Jenkinson, Mowat, & Mowat, 1992)

These questions elicit evaluative judgments from the patient’s perspective of...

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References

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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2014

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Department of Public HealthUniversity of OxfordOxfordUK