Detailled Information

Ware et al. Med Care

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The SF-12 is a shorter version of the SF-36 and uses only 12 questions to measure functional health and wellbeing from the patient’s perspective. The original objective was to develop a short, generic health-status measure that reproduces the 2 summary scores of the SF-36, i.e., the physical component summary (PCS) score and the mental component summary (MCS) score.

Content: The SF-12 consists of 12 items: 2 items on physical functioning, 2 items on role physical, 1 item on bodily pain, 1 item on general health, 1 item on vitality, 1 item on social functioning, 2 items on role emotional, and 2 items on mental health. Since more items permit better representation of each domain, the domains are best represented by the SF-36. The most useful measures derived from the SF-12 are the 2 aggregate summary measures: the PCS and MCS.

The SF-36 contains a mixture of positively- (higher scores indicate better health) and negatively-worded response scales, so some items need to be recoded prior to scoring. The scale scores are calculated by summing responses across scale items and then transforming these raw scores to a 0–100 scale. Computerized scoring algorithms are available and can be used to produce norm-based T scores for each scale (with a mean of 50 and SD of 10) as well as the PCS and MCS summary scores.