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Assessing Children's Eudaimonic Well-Being: The PROMIS Pediatric Meaning and Purpose Item Banks
Christopher B Forrest1, Katherine B Bevans2, Ania Filus3
1Applied Clinical Research Center, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.
Insights
The Patient-Reported Outcome Measurement Information System (PROMIS) Pediatric Meaning and Purpose item banks were developed to measure children's well-being. These validated tools assess hopefulness and optimism in children for research and clinical use.
Area of Science:
- Psychometrics
- Pediatric Psychology
- Health Outcomes Research
Background:
- Assessing children's psychological well-being is crucial for understanding their overall health.
- Existing measures may not adequately capture the constructs of meaning and purpose in pediatric populations.
Purpose of the Study:
- To develop and validate the Patient-Reported Outcome Measurement Information System (PROMIS) Pediatric Meaning and Purpose item banks.
- To create child-report and parent-proxy versions for diverse applications.
Main Methods:
- Item pool development and evaluation using data from over 1,800 children and 900 parents.
- Item response theory (IRT) calibration on a combined sample of nearly 2,000 children and 2,200 parents.
- Validation studies using combined child and parent samples.
Main Results:
- Eleven items were removed due to poor performance, resulting in reliable scales (>0.90).
- Short forms demonstrated high precision across a wide range of the latent variable.
- Scores correlated positively with psychological functioning and negatively with distress, pessimism, and pain.
Conclusions:
- The PROMIS Pediatric Meaning and Purpose item banks are validated and ready for clinical research and practice.
- These measures effectively assess children's eudaimonic well-being, including hopefulness and optimism.
- Lower scores were associated with adolescence and special healthcare needs.
Objective:
To describe the development of the Patient-Reported Outcome Measurement Information System (PROMIS) Pediatric Meaning and Purpose item banks, child-report and parent-proxy editions.
Methods:
Data were collected from two samples. The first comprised 1,895 children (8-17 years old) and 927 parents of children 5-17 years old recruited from an Internet panel, medical clinics, and schools. The second comprised a nationally representative sample of 990 children 8-17 years old and 1,292 parents of children 5-17 years old recruited from a different Internet panel. Item pool evaluation was done with Sample 1 and analyses were used to support decisions about item retention. The combined sample was used for item response theory (IRT) calibration of the item bank. Both samples were used in validation studies.
Results:
Eleven items were deleted from the item pool because of poor psychometric performance. The final versions of the scales showed excellent reliability (>0.90). Short form scales (4 or 8 items) had a high degree of precision across over 4 SD units of the latent variable. The item bank positively correlated with extant measures of positive psychological functioning, and negatively correlated with measures of emotional distress, pessimism, and pain. Lower meaning and purpose scores were associated with adolescence and presence of a special healthcare need.
Conclusion:
The PROMIS Pediatric Meaning and Purpose item banks and their short forms are ready for use in clinical research and practice. They are measures of children's eudaimonic well-being and indicative of children's hopefulness, optimism, goal-directedness, and feelings that life is worth living.