Screening for Distress in Oncological Patients: The Revised Version of the Psychological Distress Inventory (PDI-R)

Abstract

BackgroundPsychological research in oncological settings is steadily increasing and the construct of psychological distress has rapidly gained popularity—leading to the development of questionnaires aimed at its measurement. The Psychological Distress Inventory (PDI) is one of the most used instruments, but its psychometric properties were not yet deeply evaluated. The present studies aimed at investigating the psychometric properties of the PDI (Study 1) and providing a revised version of the tool (Study 2).MethodsOncological outpatients were enrolled at the Department of Medical Oncology of the Presidio Ospedaliero of Saronno, ASST Valle Olona, Italy. For the first study (N = 251), an Exploratory Graph Analysis was used to explore the item structure of the PDI. In the second study (N = 902), the psychometric properties of the revised PDI (PDI-R) were deeply assessed.ResultsStudy 1 showed that the PDI has a not clear structure and it should be reconsidered. On the opposite, Study 2 showed that the revised version (PDI-R) has a solid factorial structure, it is invariant across gender and age, and it has good psychometric properties.ConclusionResults suggest that the PDI-R is a reliable measure of psychological distress in different samples of oncological patients, with stronger psychometric properties than the original version. Its use in the clinical and research field is therefore recommended to improve the quality of both assessment and treatment of psychological distress in patients with oncological problems.

Ten years since its definition and validation: The Mental Disorder Causal Beliefs Scale.

“…In order to reach this objective, a psychometric network analysis approach was used. The results of this study conducted with 3,009 participants confirmed that etiological beliefs are characterized by two poles—psychosocial and biological–genetic—and that these two poles are highly interconnected (e.g., Mannarini & Boffo, 2013; Rossi, Marconi, et al, 2022). Specifically, the thickest edge resulted between Item 6 (biological–genetic pole: “Some people have been depressed from birth and they will be depressed for the rest of their lives”) and Item 28 (psychosocial pole: “Childhood traumas, such as sexual abuse in a very violent family environment, might impede a healthy mental development”).…”

Cognitive restraint, uncontrolled eating, and emotional eating. The Italian version of the Three Factor Eating Questionnaire-Revised 18 (TFEQ-R-18): a three-step validation study

“…Preliminary analyses were performed: examination of items’ normality, the presence of excessive correlations (e.g., r > 0.85) among them [ 34 , 39 ] as well as their level of informativeness—an item may be deemed poorly informative if its standard deviation (SD) falls 2.5 standard deviations below the mean of all items [ 40 – 43 ].…”

Continuous Norming Approaches: A Systematic Review and Real Data Example

“…Articles by the developers of semiparametric norming (A. Lenhard et al, 2018a) reported the most detailed information; other authors described their models as supplements (Echemendia et al, 2021) or did not report clear information on the model (Rossi et al, 2022).…”