The long and the short of it: the development of the SF-36 General Health Survey

The purpose of this chapter is to provide a "natural history" of health status measures which have been developed from research undertaken initially by the RAND Corporation in the United States. In doing so the aim is to describe the genealogy of the short-form 36-item General Health Survey questionnaire (SF-36), one of the latest and most frequently used in the family of subjective health status measures. A copy of this questionnaire appears at the end of this chapter.