Measuring the social psychological health states of ambulatory chronically ill patients: hypertension and diabetes as tracer conditions.

Measures of social psychological health states were developed and tested for dimensionality, internal consistency, and generalizability on samples of ambulatory hypertensive and diabetic patients. Despite the existence of several measures of health status, none had been tested solely on ambulatory chronically ill patients. Therefore, to insure that sensitive, reliable measures were available to measure patients' responses to nursing interventions designed to increase ambulatory chronically ill patients' participation in their care of themselves, these measures were developed. The two scales were found to be reliable, generalizable, and valid, in that they were correlated with existing measures of symptom severity, psychological, and functional health status. The question of whether disease specific measures of health status are preferable to more general measures is discussed.