The face scale: A brief, nonverbal method for assessing patient mood

✍ Scribed by Christopher D. Lorish; Richard Maisiak

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1986
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 373 KB
• Volume: 29
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0004-3591
• DOI: 10.1002/art.1780290714

✦ Synopsis

Validity and reliability studies were conducted on the Face Scale, a very brief, pictorial scale of mood which uses a sequence of 20 faces and does not require reading literacy. Correlational and experimental evidence of the Face Scale's construct validity is presented, as well as its test-retest reliability. Recommendations are made for its use as a screening tool and for additional validity studies.

Depressed mood often occurs in arthritis patients (1,2) and may affect their response to the disease and treatment (3,4). Although there are now several instruinents designed to assess the status of arthritis patients, few assess patient mood, and none make that assessment in under 2 minutes. Several instruments, such as the Beck Depression Inventory (5) or the Zung Self-Rating Depression Scale (6), have been developed solely to assess patient mood. Other instruments which measure aspects of health status (7) may also indirectly assess mood. Scales for assessment of arthritis patients tend to be based on verbal materials and normally contain several stem sentences and alternate responses. These require from 10-30 minutes to complete, a serious limitation when used in a busy clinic. Another limitation of the scales is that they must be read to patients who have low literacy skills or severe disabilities, and this further increases the time and labor commitment needed to obtain the data.