ABSTRACT
Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in the measurement of health status and the evaluation of health care. Indeed, a proliferation of instruments now exists spanning functional disability, psychological wellbeing, social health, quality of life and life satisfaction, pain measurement and general health measurement (McDowell & Newell 1987, Bowling 1991). One of the most well known and extensively evaluated health status instruments to date, however, is the Sickness Impact Profile (SIP) (Bergner et al. 1981). Indeed, as McDowell & Newell (1987) comment, this scale is something of a gold standard against which other measures are judged.
