Real-time Symptom Assessment in Patients With Endometriosis: Psychometric Evaluation of an Electronic Patient-Reported Outcome Measure, Based on the Experience Sampling Method (Preprint)

Esther van Barneveld, Arianne Lim, Nehalennia van Hanegem, Frits van Osch, Lisa Vork, Joanna W. Kruimel, Marlies Y. Bongers, Carsten Leue
2021 · doi:10.2196/preprints.29480 · W4323057115
preprint OA: gold CC0
🔓 Open OA copy Full text JSON View on OpenAlex View at publisher
⚙ AI-generated summary by claude@2026-06, 2026-06-09 ⓘ

This study evaluated an electronic, experience sampling method questionnaire for endometriosis symptoms, finding good internal consistency and concurrent validity with existing measures.

One-sentence paraphrase of the abstract; not a substitute for reading it. No clinical advice. How this works

⚙ AI-generated deep summary by claude@2026-06, 2026-06-10 · read from full text ⓘ

This short-term follow-up prospective study evaluated the psychometric properties of an endometriosis-specific electronic patient-reported outcome measure using the experience sampling method (ESM) in 28 premenopausal adults reporting dysmenorrhea, chronic pelvic pain, or dyspareunia. Participants received ESM questionnaires via a smartphone app ten times per day over one week at random moments and also completed demographic measures plus end-of-day and end-of-week symptom assessments; the study assessed compliance, concurrent validity, internal consistency, and test-retest reliability. ESM compliance was up to 52%, end-of-week pain scores were higher than mean ESM scores and showed peak reporting, while ESM scores demonstrated strong concurrent validity against GSRS-IBS, GAD-7, PHQ-9, and most EHP-30 items with good-to-excellent reliability measures. This paper is centrally about endometriosis — it psychometrically evaluates a momentary, ESM-based electronic symptom assessment tool for endometriosis patients.

Read from the paper's body, not the abstract. Not a substitute for reading the paper. No clinical advice. How this works

Abstract

BACKGROUND The experience sampling method (ESM) holds advantages over traditional retrospective questionnaires including a high ecological validity, no recall bias, the ability to assess fluctuation of symptoms, and the ability to analyze the temporal relationship between variables. OBJECTIVE This study aimed to evaluate the psychometric properties of an endometriosis-specific ESM tool. METHODS This is a short-term follow-up prospective study, including patients with premenopausal endometriosis aged ≥18 years who reported dysmenorrhea, chronic pelvic pain, or dyspareunia between December 2019 and November 2020. An ESM-based questionnaire was sent out by a smartphone application 10 times a day during 1 week on randomly chosen moments. Additionally, patients completed questionnaires concerning demographics, end-of-day pain scores, and end-of-week symptom scores. The psychometric evaluation included compliance, concurrent validity, and internal consistency. RESULTS Twenty-eight patients with endometriosis completed the study. Compliance for answering the ESM questions was as high as 52%. End-of-week pain scores were higher than ESM mean scores and showed peak reporting. ESM scores showed strong concurrent validity when compared with symptoms scored by the Gastrointestinal Symptom Rating Scale–Irritable Bowel Syndrome, 7-item Generalized Anxiety Disorders Scale, 9-question Patient Health Questionnaire, and the majority of questions of the 30-item Endometriosis Health Profile. Cronbach α coefficients demonstrated a good internal consistency for abdominal symptoms, general somatic symptoms, and positive affect, and an excellent internal consistency for negative affect. CONCLUSIONS This study supports the validity and reliability of a newly developed electronic instrument for the measurement of symptoms in women with endometriosis, based on momentary assessments. This ESM patient-reported outcome measure has the advantage of providing a more detailed view on individual symptom patterns and offers the possibility for patients to have insight in their symptomatology, leading to more individualized treatment strategies that can improve the quality of life of women with endometriosis. CLINICALTRIAL
Full text 3,094 characters · extracted from oa-html · 5 sections · click to expand

Abstract

Background: The Experience Sampling Method (ESM) holds advantages over traditional retrospective questionnaires including a high ecological validity, no recall bias, the ability to assess fluctuation of symptoms and the ability to analyse the temporal relationship between variables.

Objective

This study aimed to evaluate the psychometric properties of an endometriosis-specific ESM tool.

Methods

This is a short-term follow-up prospective study, including premenopausal endometriosis patients aged ≥18 years that reported dysmenorrhea, chronic pelvic pain or dyspareunia between December 2019 and November 2020. An ESM-based questionnaire was sent out by a smartphone application ten times a day during one week on randomly chosen moments. Additionally, patients completed questionnaires concerning demographics, end-of-day pain scores, and end-of-week symptom scores. The psychometric evaluation included compliance, concurrent validity, internal consistency, and test-retest reliability.

Results

Twenty-eight endometriosis patients completed the study. Compliance for answering the ESM questions was as high as 52%. End-of-week pain scores were higher compared to ESM mean scores and showed peak-reporting. ESM scores showed strong concurrent validity when compared to symptoms scored by the GSRS-IBS, GAD-7, PHQ-9 and the majority of questions of the EHP-30. Cronbach’s α coefficients demonstrated a good internal consistency for abdominal symptoms, general somatic symptoms and positive affect and an excellent internal consistency for negative affect. Moreover, excellent test-retest reliability was shown.

Conclusions

The current study supports the validity and reliability of a newly developed electronic instrument for the measurement of symptoms in women with endometriosis, based on momentary assessments. This ESM-PROM has the advantage of a more detailed view on individual symptom patterns and can offer the possibility of self-insight of patients in their symptomatology, leading to more individualized treatment strategies which can improve the quality of life of women suffering from endometriosis. Clinical Trial: Not applicable. Citation The author of this paper has made a PDF available, but requires the user to login, or create an account. Copyright © The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.

Text is read by the "Ask this paper" AI Q&A widget below. Extraction quality varies by source — PMC NXML preserves structure cleanly, OA-HTML may include some navigation residue, and OA-PDF can have broken hyphenation. The publisher copy (via DOI) is the canonical version.

My notes (saved in your browser only)

⚙ Ask this paper AI returns verbatim quotes from the full text · source: oa-html ⓘ

Answers must be backed by verbatim quotes from this paper's full text. Hallucinated quotes are dropped automatically; if no verbatim passage answers the question, we say so. How this works

Outcome instruments

EHP-30

Condition tags

endometriosischronic_pelvic_paindysmenorrheadyspareuniairritable_bowel_syndrome

Citation neighborhood

Papers in the corpus that this work cites (lower rings, blue) and that cite this one (upper rings, green). Dot size scales with the paper's in-corpus citation count — bigger dot = more influential within the endo/adeno field. Click a dot to open that paper. [ expand to 2 hops ] — adds papers reached through this work's immediate citers/citees. Heavier; up to 60 extra dots.

References (17)

Source provenance

openalex
last seen: 2026-06-04T00:00:01.174412+00:00
License: CC0 · commercial use OK