Fear of progression in chronic diseases: psychometric properties of the Fear of Progression Questionnaire.
OBJECTIVE
The aim of this study was the development and psychometric testing of a new psychological questionnaire to measure the fear of progression (FoP) in chronically ill patients (cancer, diabetes mellitus and rheumatic diseases).


METHODS
The Fear of Progression Questionnaire (FoP-Q) was developed in four phases: (1) generation of items (65 interviews); (2) reduction of items--the initial version of the questionnaire (87 items) was presented to 411 patients, to construct subscales and test the reliability; (3) testing the convergent and discriminative validity of the reduced test version (43 items) within a new sample (n=439); (4) translation--German to English.


RESULTS
The scale comprised five factors (Cronbach's alpha >.70): affective reactions (13 items), partnership/family (7), occupation (7), loss of autonomy (7) and coping with anxiety (9). The test-retest reliability coefficients varied between .77 and .94. There was only a medium relationship to traditional anxiety scales. This is an indication of the independence of the FoP. Significant relationships between the FoP-Q and the patient's illness behaviour indicate discriminative validity.


CONCLUSIONS
The FoP-Q is a new and unique questionnaire developed for the chronically ill. A major problem and source of stress for this patient group has been measuring both specifically and economically the FoP of an illness. The FoP-Q was designed to resolve this problem, fulfill this need and reduce this stress.
Herschbach
Peter
P
Institute and Outpatient Clinic for Psychosomatic Medicine, Psychotherapy und Medical Psychology, Technical University of Munich, Munich, Germany. P.Herschbach@lrz.tum.de
Berg
Petra
P
Dankert
Andrea
A
Duran
Gabriele
G
Engst-Hastreiter
Ursula
U
Waadt
Sabine
S
Keller
Monika
M
Ukat
Robert
R
Henrich
Gerhard
G
D000328:Adult; D002908:Chronic Disease; D003920:Diabetes Mellitus / Q000473:pathology / Q000523:psychology; D018450:Disease Progression; D005239:Fear; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D009369:Neoplasms / Q000473:pathology / Q000523:psychology; D011379:Prognosis; D011569:Psychiatric Status Rating Scales; D011594:Psychometrics; D012216:Rheumatic Diseases / Q000473:pathology / Q000523:psychology; D013315:Stress, Psychological; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires