Paper
Wednesday, 19 July 2006
This presentation is part of : Developing and Testing Instruments and Scales
Assessing Responsiveness of Cancer-Related Fatigue Instruments: Distribution-Based and Individual Anchor-Based Methods
Shiow-Ching Shun, PhD, School of Nursing, National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan and Susan Beck, APRN, PhD, FAAN, College of Nursing, University of Utah, Salt Lake, UT, USA.
Learning Objective #1: Gain the knowledge related to assessing responsiveness of instruments based on distribution-based and individual anchor-based methods.
Learning Objective #2: Obtain the knowledge of the minimal important changes in cancer-related fatigue.
The purpose of this study was to compare the results of tests of responsiveness for Chinese versions of the Cancer Fatigue Scale (C-CFS), the Schwartz Cancer Fatigue Scale-revised (C-SCFS-r), and the Fatigue Symptom Inventory (C-FSI) based on two methods: evaluation of effect sizes and patient perceptions of change. Convenience sampling was used to recruit subjects at a chemotherapy treatment center for outpatients in Taiwan. Data were collected twice: on the day cancer patients received chemotherapy treatment (T1), and two days post-treatment (T2). One hundred forty-nine subjects (61.3%) completed the questionnaires at T2. The differences between T1 and T2 were statistically significant for all three scales. The effect sizes for the C-CFS, C-SCFS-r were large and for the C-FSI was medium. The mean change per item fatigue scores for the “small change” group for the C-CFS, C-SCFS-r and C-FSI were .51, .73, and 1.11, respectively. The trend of mean differences per-item for the fatigue scales gradually increased from the group of “no change” to the group of “large change” except on the C-CFS. Results indicate that the three scales are sensitive to change over two days. However, the C-CFS may not effectively discriminate between a moderate and large change. Further testing on cancer patients with severe fatigue to examine responsiveness for the three scales is recommended.

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