The DES measures patient engagement in the healthcare decision-making process. Patient engagement is vital for supporting patient-centered outcomes, which simply means providing care that emphasizes what matters to the individual patient. The DES-10 is cancer-specific and spans five overlapping domains: diagnostic awareness and acceptance, empowerment, active involvement, information seeking, and planning. The short-form DES-3 correlates highly with the DES-10 and would be acceptable to non-cancer patients as well as healthy adults.
Administration and Scoring
Instructions, items, and scoring found in Table 2 of the primary article (more to come) |PDF|
Evidence of Reliability and Validity
In the above publication, we document the reliability (Cronbach's alpha = .71-84), factor structure (CFI = .92, sRMR = .04, RMSEA = .04), and concurrent validity with related constructs (d = 0.53-1.06). We have provided a list of publications citing the DES, which will be updated periodically. |DOC|
Permission to Use
No permission is required to use our measures.
Free! Our team has developed several survey measures over the years. Most of these measures were developed with the support of federal, state, intramural, and foundation funds, so they are available free of charge.
Modifications? You are welcome to make modifications to "improve" our measures for your population and research question if under the guidance of a psychologist or other professional with expertise in psychometrics. Please note any changes in the methods section of resulting manuscripts.
