Self-Reported Outcomes, referred to as Patient Reported Outcomes (PROs) in the context of healthcare, include any report coming directly from the person or persons affected by their life, health condition(s) and treatment (Patrick et al., 2007). PROs:
Developers and users should specify and label the content and type of measure for every application of a PRO and provide evidence of its appropriateness to the intended use, for validity of the measure as used in a particular case, and how to interpret results.
Table 1 presents examples of validation of interpretation of PROs. A major challenge faces developers and users of these measures in establishing a testable theory of the expected and observed relationships among the different concepts and domains of quality of life.
Validity and Interpretability of Patient-Reported Outcomes
It is as important to establish a theory of how to link clinical variables with health-related quality of life as it is to link larger determinants of PROs such as political unrest, economic depression, inequalities, and sociocultural trends and processes (Wilson and Cleary, 1995; Patrick and Erickson, 1993; Patrick and Chiang, 2000).