Measure
The National Institute of Health-developed PROMIS tools are a set of person-centered measures to evaluate various physical, mental and social health concerns across many populations. The PROMIS Sexual Function and Satisfaction (SexFS) tools are a set of measures aimed at assessing sexual function and satisfaction. These tools have gender-specific coordinating versions and have been validated in adult (mean age 58.5 years) cancer populations.21,22 The PROMIS SexFS includes multiple validated (content validity, face validity, construct validity and reliability) modules that can be selected to obtain detailed information about various types of SD. Specifically, in adult cancer populations, the PROMIS SexFS tools demonstrate high internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha 0.87-0.95) and favorable test-retest reliability (0.71–0.87).21 In this study, we evaluated the PROMIS v.2.0 Brief Profile SexFS , which was created to be a clinically useful general screening tool and consists of 10 questions for males and 14 questions for females.9,21,22 As described below, an additional set of similarly formatted questions on a different topic, anxiety, were used for a practice round.
PROMIS measures were administered and managed using REDCap electronic data capture tools hosted at the University of Colorado Denver.33 REDCap (Research Electronic Data Capture) is a secure, web-based application designed to support data capture for research studies. In contrast to the intended presentation of the SexFS Brief each item was presented individually to facilitate Think-Aloud.