Equivalence of electronic and paper-and-pencil administration of patient-reported outcome measures: a meta-analytic review.
By C. Gwaltney, A. Shields, Saul Shiffman. Value in Health, 2008
629 citations recorded by the source corpus.
OBJECTIVES Patient-reported outcomes (PROs; self-report assessments) are increasingly important in evaluating medical care and treatment efficacy. Electronic administration of PROs via computer is becoming widespread. This article reviews the literature addressing whether computer-administered tests are equivalent to their paper-and-pencil forms. METHODS Meta-analysis was used to synthesize 65 studies that directly assessed the equivalence of computer versus paper versions of PROs used in clinical trials. A total of 46 unique studies, evaluating 278 scales, provided sufficient detail to allow quantitative analysis. RESULTS Among 233 direct comparisons, the average mean difference between modes averaged 0.2% of the scale range (e.g., 0.02 points on a 10-point scale), and 93% were within +/-5% of the scale range. Among 207 correlation coefficients between paper and computer instruments (typically intraclass correlation coefficients), the average weighted correlation was 0.90; 94% of correlations were at least 0.75. Because the cross-mode correlation (paper vs. computer) is also a test-retest correlation, with potential variation because of retest, we compared it to the within-mode (paper vs. paper) test-retest correlation. In four comparisons that evaluated both, the average cross-mode paper-to-computer correlation was almost identical to the within-mode correlation for readministration of a paper measure (0.88 vs. 0.91). CONCLUSIONS Extensive evidence indicates that paper- and computer-administered PROs are equivalent.
Subfields: Applied Psychology, Health Information Management, Oncology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fbc93b414280c3c0b8ce82966ebc1ff60560576b
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In Applied Psychology
Citations in the corpus
- An official American Thoracic Society/European Respiratory Society statement: asthma control and exacerbations: standardizing endpoints for clinical asthma trials and clinical practice. (2009, background): “In a meta-analysis, paper- and computeradministered versions of patient-reported outcomes were found to be equivalent (91).”
- Electronic patient‐reported outcome systems in oncology clinical practice (2012, background): “Results of a large number of studies show that paper- and Web-based surveys provide data that are essentially equivalent.(9) There are currently a small but quickly growing number of studies testing the equivalence of Web- and/or paper-based surveys to telephone-based surveys.”
- Experience sampling research in psychopathology: opening the black box of daily life (2009, positive): “2008), providing equivalent results (Gwaltney et al. 2008).”