Age and Ageing 1996:25:159-167 Predictive Validity of a Postal Questionnaire for Screening Community-dwelling Elderly Individuals at Risk of Functional Decline
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Screening elderly individuals who are at risk of functional decline in the community is essential in order to implement effective programmes of assessment and surveillance in a context of secondary prevention. The postal questionnaire technique consists of sending a simple questionnaire to all elderly individuals living in a defined area in order to identify those who are at risk. The objective of this study was to develop a postal questionnaire and to test its capacity to predict functional decline in community-dwelling elderly people. A 21-item postal questionnaire was sent with a birthday card to a representative sample of community-dwelling individuals over the age of 75 years (n = 842). One month after sending the questionnaire, all subjects were contacted by a nurse for an in-home interview (n = 655) that included assessment of functional autonomy. One year later, the subjects (n = 607) were reassessed by the same nurse. Of the eligible subjects, 87.4 % returned the postal questionnaire. During the year following the completion of the postal questionnaire, 43 subjects died, 13 were institutionalized and 109 had experienced a significant decrease on the autonomy scale, for a total annual occurrence of functional decline of 27.2%. Age and 14 of the 21 items of the questionnaire were associated with a significant relative risk of functional decline. The relative risk associated with not responding to the questionnaire was 2.1. A stepwise logistic regression analysis showed that six items were independent predictors of functional decline. This 6-item Sherbrooke Postal Questionnaire identifies as positive 56 % of the population with 75 % sensitivity and 52 % specificity. We conclude that a postal questionnaire is a feasible and valid technique for screening elderly individuals at risk for functional decline.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.035 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.002 |
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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".