Establishing a common metric for self-reported anxiety: Linking the MASQ, PANAS, and GAD-7 to PROMIS Anxiety

Benjamin D. Schalet*, Karon F. Cook, Seung W. Choi, David Cella

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

217 Scopus citations

Abstract

Researchers and clinicians wishing to assess anxiety must choose from among numerous assessment options, many of which purport to measure the same or a similar construct. A common reporting metric would have great value and can be achieved when similar instruments are administered to a single sample and then linked to each other to produce cross-walk score tables. Using item response theory (IRT), we produced cross-walk tables linking three popular "legacy" anxiety instruments - MASQ (N=743), GAD-7 (N=748), and PANAS (N=1120) - to the anxiety metric of the NIH Patient Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System (PROMIS®). The linking relationships were evaluated by resampling small subsets and estimating confidence intervals for the differences between the observed and linked PROMIS scores. Our results allow clinical researchers to retrofit existing data of three commonly used anxiety measures to the PROMIS Anxiety metric and to compare clinical cut-off scores.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)88-96
Number of pages9
JournalJournal of Anxiety Disorders
Volume28
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - Jan 2014

Funding

This research was part of the PROsetta Stone® project, which was funded by the National Institutes of Health/National Cancer Institute grant RC4CA157236 (David Cella, PI). For more information on PROsetta Stone, please see www.prosettastone.org . We would like to thank Joshua Rutsohn and Helena Correia for their help in the preparation of this manuscript.

Keywords

  • Anxiety
  • GAD-7
  • Linking
  • MASQ
  • PANAS
  • PROMIS

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Psychiatry and Mental health
  • Clinical Psychology

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