They have been shown to be valid , reliable , and responsive , with a low administration burden .
BACKGROUND The aim of this study was to perform a st and ardized and systematic evaluation of the available evidence on multi-item shoulder-specific patient-reported outcome measures that are applicable to a wide spectrum of disorders .
Measuring Function of the Shoulder. A Cross-Sectional Comparison of Five Questionnaires*
Measures of both generic and disease-specific health status are being developed and used with increasing frequency for the appraisal of musculoskeletal conditions . The purpose of this study was to compare prospect ively the validity of five question naires in the assessment of function of the shoulder . Ninety subjects who had various problems related to the shoulder agreed to enter the study . All of the subjects completed a question naire package that included the  Shoulder Pain and Disability Index , the Simple Shoulder Test , the Subjective Shoulder Rating Scale , the Modified American Shoulder and Elbow Surgeons Shoulder Patient Self-Evaluation Form , and the Shoulder Severity Index as well as a measure of generic health status ( the acute version of the Short Form 36 [ SF-36 ] ) and two questions that asked the patient to rate the severity of the problem and his or her over-all health . Frequency distributions were created and compared among question naires . Spearman rank correlations were calculated to compare the question naires with each other and with other assessment s. One-way analysis of variance was used to determine the ability of the question naires to discriminate between self-rated severity of the problem and over-all health . The frequency distributions were similar among the five shoulder question naires , but those of the five shoulder question naires differed from that of the SF-36 . The correlations were good ( 0.73 ⩽ r ⩽ 0.80 ) among all of the five shoulder question naires except the Subjective Shoulder Rating Scale ; they were lower with the Subjective Shoulder Rating Scale and the physical function dimension of the SF-36 ( 0.12 ⩽ r ⩽ 0.60 ) . The shoulder question naires discriminated between levels of severity ( p < 0.0001 ) but not between levels of over-all health ( 0.10 ⩽ p ⩽ 0.86 ) . In this concurrent comparison of measures of shoulder-specific outcome in the same subjects , the shoulder question naires performed similarly , both in describing function of the shoulder and in discriminating between levels of severity . The shoulder question naires performed differently than the SF-36 , which confirms the need to use both disease-specific and generic health-status measures to evaluate patients who have a problem related to the shoulder
They have been shown to be valid , reliable , and responsive , with a low administration burden .
BACKGROUND The aim of this study was to perform a st and ardized and systematic evaluation of the available evidence on multi-item shoulder-specific patient-reported outcome measures that are applicable to a wide spectrum of disorders .