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Functional status II(R). A measure of child health status
1Department of Pediatrics, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, NY 10461.
Insights
A revised Functional Status Measure II-Revised (FS II(R)) effectively assesses child health. This validated tool offers reliable health status measurement for children aged 0-16, including those with chronic conditions.
Area of Science:
- Pediatric Health Assessment
- Child Health Status Measurement
- Chronic Condition Management in Children
Background:
- Limited validated measures exist for assessing the health status of children with chronic physical conditions.
- The original Functional Status Measure (FS I) showed promise but required revision.
- Advancements in pediatric care lead to more children surviving long-term with chronic disorders.
Purpose of the Study:
- To describe and validate a revised Functional Status Measure, FS II(R).
- To assess the psychometric properties of the new instrument in a diverse pediatric population.
- To provide a reliable tool for measuring health status across the entire childhood age range.
Main Methods:
- Collected data from 732 children aged 0-16 years, with and without chronic conditions.
- Developed and tested both a long (43-item) and a short (14-item) version of the FS II(R).
- Evaluated psychometric properties including internal consistency, discriminant, construct, and content validity.
Main Results:
- The FS II(R) demonstrated excellent psychometric properties across both long and short versions.
- Internal consistency estimates (alphas) exceeded 0.80 for all versions and factors.
- Both versions showed similar performance in validity tests, confirming they measure the same construct.
Conclusions:
- The FS II(R) is a psychometrically sound instrument for measuring child health status from 0 to 16 years.
- The measure is particularly valuable for children with chronic physical conditions who are not disabled.
- FS II(R) provides concise and reliable health status data for pediatric populations.
Abstract:
Few measures are available to assess the health status of the growing numbers of children who now survive long-term with chronic physical disorders. A Functional Status Measure, FS I, that had considerable promise for measuring individual child health status and characterizing populations was developed in 1978. This paper describes a revised version of that measures. Data were collected using a new sample of 732 children (aged 0 to 16 years) with and without chronic physical conditions in order to assess the psychometric properties of the new instrument. The FS II(R) has both a long (43-item) and a short (14-item) version. The long version has a total score derived from a one factor solution and a two factor solution consisting of General Health and Stage Specific factors for each age group. The 14-item version of FS II(R) uses a common core of items across the entire age span. Internal consistency estimates (alphas) for the factor-based and 14-item versions are all greater than 0.80. At each age, long and short versions behave similarly in a wide range of tests of discriminant, construct, and content validity--strong support that they constitute a common measure. The FS II(R) has excellent psychometric properties and provides concise measures of health status of children spanning the entire childhood age range from 0 to 16 years. It has particular strengths for the measurement of health status of children with chronic physical conditions who are not disabled.