The following items ask about how much your illness and/or its treatment interferes with different aspects of your life. Please circle the one number that best describes your current life situation. If an item is not applicable, please check the "Not applicable" box to indicate that this aspect of your life is not affected. Please do not leave any item unanswered.

How much does your illness and/or its treatment interfere with...

Items (using the same format as above):

1. your feeling of being healthy?
2. the things you eat and drink?
3. your work, including job, house work, chores, or errands?
4. playing sports, gardening, or other physical recreation or hobbies?
5. quiet recreation or hobbies, such as reading, TV, music, knitting, etc.?
6. your financial situation?
7. your relationship with your spouse or domestic partner?
8. your sex life?
9. your relationship and social activities with your family?
10. social activities with your friends, neighbors, or groups?
11. your religious or spiritual activities?
12. your involvement in community or civic activities?
13. your self-improvement or self-expression activities?

Scoring

Code the number circled for each item. If more than one consecutive response is marked, code the higher number (more interference). If responses are not consecutive, do not code. If "Not applicable" is checked, code as one (1).

Subscale scores are the mean of the items within each subscale. To score the scale, average the subscale scores to correct for differences in the numbers of items combined. You may also generate a total Perceived Intrusiveness score by summing the individual items.

Characteristics

Tested on 606 subjects with chronic disease. These data are from summing all items.

Source of Psychometric Data

Stanford/Garfield Kaiser Chronic Disease Dissemination Study. Results reported in: Lorig KR, Sobel, DS, Ritter PL, Laurent, D, Hobbs, M. Effect of a Self-Management Program for Patients with Chronic Disease. Effective Clinical Practice, 4, 2001,pp. 256-262. Psychometrics not reported in this article.

Comments

This is an adapted version of Illness Intrusiveness Ratings scale developed by Gerald Devins. After using the original scale, we added some words to each category to make the question clearer, and also added the "not applicable" response category. The original scale instructed respondents to circle "1" if the item was not applicable, which we found resulted in missing data, especially for the sex, self-expression, religious expression and community involvement questions. The "not applicable" category has greatly reduced missing responses. If this scale is used online, we state the entire question each time (i.e., "How much does your illness and/or its treatment interfere with your feeling of being healthy?"), and use radio buttons rather than numbers and the check box. This is a good scale to measure role function; it measures a broad spectrum of life's roles. Reprinted with permission.

References

Devins GM, Binik YM, Hutchinson TA, Hollomby DJ, Barré PE & Guttmann RD. The emotional impact of end-stage renal disease: Importance of patients' perceptions of intrusiveness and control. International Journal of Psychiatry in Medicine. 13(4), 1983, pp.327-343.

Devins GM, Mandin H, Hons RB, Burgess ED, Klassen J, Taub K, Schorr S, Letourneau PK & Buckle S. Illness intrusiveness and qulaity of life in end-stage renal disease: Comparison and stability across treatment modalities. Health Psychology, 9(2), 1990, pp.117-142.

To download this scale and scoring instructions, right click the link below with your mouse and "Save as" to you hard disk or desktop (for Windows), or double click (Mac):

Download PDF version