Sensitivity to change of the distress thermometer in a sample of pediatric cancer survivors
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: The Quebec Cancer Board recommends screening for distress at all major phases of the cancer trajectory in patients and their family. Tools used to screen for distress have been extensively studied in regards to their criterion validity but very little is known on their reliability and sensitivity to change. The objective of this study is to ascertain the degree of sensitivity of the tool and explore moderators of sensitivity. METHODS: Eighty adolescents and young adults (Age 21.6 yrs) who have been treated for a pediatric acute lymphoblastic leukemia have participated to this study. They responded to questions on two occasions. Test-retest measures involved the Distress Thermometer and the Positive and Negative Affect Scale. At retest, participants also took tests of emotion regulation including the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire, in order to evaluate emotional avoidance. FINDINGS: Results from regression analyses indicate that sensitivity of the DT was fair with changes over 11 months correlating with the underlying concept of negative affectivity (r > .49), but not positive affectivity (r < .10). When considered according to pre-validated cut-point, the DT showed higher sensitivity to change in negative affect over the period. Hierarchical regression moderation models showed that emotional avoidance may hinder sensitivity perhaps because it is a barrier to emotional disclosure on the DT. DISCUSSION: Sensitivity of the DT was fair on an ecological period of time. Sensitivity may depend on other important factors such as emotional approach. Measures of the DT in people who are more guarded should be considered cautiously.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".