A Further Type of Personal Questionnaire Technique*

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Abstract
Shapiro has described a method of constructing a questionnaire for an individual psychiatric patient to scale changes in the severity of his symptoms. This is only one of a general class of such techniques: a second type has been dessribed elsewhere; the present paper describes a third.For each symptom (i) statements are devised representing graded levels of its severity, and (ii) an ordinal scaling of the statements is obtained from the patient, (iii) On each occasion when a scaling of the current level of the symptom is required, the questionnaire is administered by presenting each of the statements to the patient in turn, and asking him to say whether he feels better or worse than indicated by it. (iv) After every administration the responses, which may be either consistent or inconsistent, are scored. Consistent sets of responses constitute an ordinal scaling of the current severity of the symptom: inconsistent ones (the possibility of which affords a check on reliability) are scored by a method which is the same as that of Slater for dealing with pair comparison preference judgements. Certain further procedures for dealing with inconsistent responding are described, and a scheme for computer scoring briefly reported.The technique is illustrated by a case, and compared with Shapiro's original method.

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