36-Item Short Form Survey (SF-36)

As part of the Medical Outcomes Study (MOS), a multi-year, multi-site study to explain variations in patient outcomes, RAND developed the 36-Item Short Form Health Survey (SF-36) in 1992. SF-36 is a set of generic, coherent, and easily administered quality-of-life measures. These measures rely upon patient self-reporting and have been widely used.

While the SF-36 is provided for public use under certain terms and conditions, we also refer users to the PROMIS measures, available at https://www.healthmeasures.net/, which have been more recently developed and updated.

Available Documents

• Terms and Conditions for Using the SF-36

  Learn more about how to use SF-36.

• MOS 36-Item Short Form Survey Instrument (SF-36) (HTML)

  View and print the English version of SF-36.

• MOS 36-Item Short Form Survey Instrument (SF-36) (Arabic PDF)

  View and print the PDF Arabic version of SF-36.

• Scoring Instructions for MOS 36-Item Short Form Survey Instrument (SF-36)

  Instructions on how to score SF-36.

Related Reading

• Evaluating the SF-36 Health Survey (Version 2) in Older Vietnamese Americans 2008

  Quyen Ngo-Metzger, Dara H. Sorkin, Carol Mangione, Barbara Gandek, Ron D. Hays

  Conceptualization of physical and mental health and associations on different scales may be different for Asian immigrants than for other groups. Interpretation of SF-36 Health Survey scores needs to account for cultural differences.

• Reliability of an Arabic Version of the RAND-36 Health Survey and Its Equivalence to the US-English Version 1998

  Stephen Coons, Saud Abdulaziz Al Abdulmohsin, JoLaine R. Draugalis, Ron D. Hays

  Additional studies need to be conducted in a sample of the Saudi population to further assess the psychometric properties of the Arabic version.

More Information about Summary Scores

For those interested in information about the physical and mental health summary scores and the work done to create a single score, we suggest the following articles:

• What is the Relationship Between the Minimally Important Difference and Health State Utility Values? The Case of the SF-6-D 2003

  Stephen J. Walters, John E. Brazier

  Health and Quality of Life Outcomes, Vol. 1, No. 1, p. 4.

• The Estimation of a Preference-based Measure of Health from the SF-36 2002

  John E. Brazier, Jennifer Roberts, Mark Deverill

  Journal of Health Economics, Vol. 21, No. 2, pp. 271-292.

• Mapping the SF-12 to the EuroQol EQ-5D Index in a National US Sample 2004

  Peter Franks, Erica I. Lubetkin, Marthe R. Gold, Daniel J. Tancredi, Haomiao Jia

  Medical Decision Making, Vol. 24, No. 3, pp. 247-254.