Assessment Tool Analysis

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This paper offers a description of assessment tools that are often used to evaluate one or more abilities. Each of the tools comes with a set of instructions on how to complete each part of the assessment as well as the method of scoring. The two assessment tools that will be discussed will be the Questions on Life Satisfaction (FLZM) and the Short Form Health Survey (SF-36) along with their psychometric properties.
According to the CDC (2016) quality of life is important to everyone and in the past, has been looked at in a very narrow lens usually focusing on mortality and morbidity. Since the early 1980s there has been more of a push to evaluate the quality of life in many areas to show how this affects individual’s overall health. This
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The tool consists of a short questionnaire that is used to evaluate the subjective feelings of the participants on their general and health related quality of life and has them think back to the past four weeks. The test includes three elements: economy, modular structure, and individual weighting of items including two 8-item modules: “Satisfaction with Health and “General Life Satisfaction”. The participants are asked to rate each of the items twice. The first answer is used to rate the subjective importance of their health and the second rates their degree of satisfaction in that specific area. The two scores are then added together to get the weighted score. The final score is the total of all eight …show more content…
The use of norm-based scoring instead of the 0-100 scale allows each scale to have the same average (50) with a standard deviation of (10 points). Using this as the reference point allows researchers to easily read that any score below 50 would indicate a below average rating providing more accurate information about the impact the disease has on the individual making it easier for the medical providers to interpret the data and effects (Ware Jr., 2000). The FLZM tool consists of modules that cover economy and individual weighted items with each section having eight questions. Participants are asked to rate each item twice, one for personal significance of the health issue being addressed and then again for the degree of satisfaction they feel regarding the issue. The responses for each section are then added up to determine what the weighted score is. The final score is the total of all eight scores. Both tools are geared towards easily understanding what the questions are asking while reducing the chances of misunderstanding. The FLZM tool uses questions that are based on the 6-point Likert scale which provides a weighted response that will result in higher scores for more satisfaction and the corresponding lower score for less satisfaction on the specific topic being