SF Health Surveys

QualityMetric's SF™ health surveys capture practical, reliable, and valid information about functional health and well-being from the patient's point of view. They are also called generic health surveys because they can be used across age, disease, and treatment group, and are appropriate for a wide variety of applications. Conversely, disease-specific health surveys are focused on a particular condition or disease.
The SF-36v2^®, SF-12v2^®, and SF-8™ Health Surveys measure the same eight health domains, and each survey provides psychometrically-based physical component summary (PCS) and mental component summary (MCS) scores.
These surveys are for adults 18 years of age and older, and can be self-administered or interview-administered. Multiple other modes of administration are offered, such as online, PDA, and more. Translations are available for multiple languages and countries. In fact, the SF-36v2 is currently available in more than 170 translations.
Scores are calibrated so that 50 is the average score or norm. This norm-based score allows comparison among the three surveys and across the more than 19,000 studies published in the past 20 years. This bibliography includes studies of hundreds of diseases, conditions, and populations, and greatly enhances the ability to interpret SF health survey data in new studies.
The SF health surveys are the most widely used tools in the world for measuring patient-reported outcomes, with more than 37,000,000 surveys taken and over 28,000 licenses issued to date. Whether you're working with large populations or individual patients, there's a generic health survey to do the job. This excerpt from the User's Manual for the SF-36v2^® Health Survey, Second Edition discusses which survey is best in different circumstances.

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