Review of Articles Related to Responsiveness as a Characteristic of Quality of Life Instruments

Responsiveness is a concept introduced in the mid-eighties by bio-medical researchers. It is considered as a fundamental feature of health-related quality of life questionnaires, which was different from reliability and validity. Responsiveness is defined as the ability of an instrument to detect the minimal clinically important differences. Most authors agree that responsiveness focuses on the ability of a criterion in measuring changes, but there is a wide variety of opinions about the nature of quantified change. This review study was performed to determine the responsiveness by using the valid and available articles. Keywords of "responsiveness" and "quality of life" were searched in Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL), ProQuest, PsycINFO, Science Direct, Scopus, and Medline databases. Multiple definitions for responsiveness and different procedures for calculating it were investigated in various studies. A total of 30 articles were used as references. Responsiveness has been divided into two groups: External and internal. “Internal responsiveness” is defined as the ability of a measure to change overa specified time frame. “External responsiveness” reflects the extent to which changes in a measure over a specified time frame relate to corresponding changes in a reference measure of health status. Despite the fact that some authors consider the responsiveness as the most basic characteristics for assessment of a tool, its measurement methodology is different. Meanwhile, there are different methods to assess responsiveness, but the researchers used one of them, and in development and validation of quality of life questionnaires must be regarded.