Williams, Guido L. http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8008-5750
Flens, Gerard http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6683-4628
Terwee, Caroline B. http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4570-2826
de Beurs, Edwin http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3832-8477
Spinhoven, Philip http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4117-335X
Paap, Muirne C. S. http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1173-7070
Article History
Accepted: 10 April 2024
First Online: 23 May 2024
Declarations
:
: Dr. C.B. Terwee is head of the Dutch-Flemish PROMIS National Center, but this did not create a conflict of interest. The other author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
: This study is part of a larger study concerning the development of Computerized Adaptive Tests for measuring the level of functioning in psychiatric patients. The Medical Ethics Review Committee (MERC) of VU University Medical Center (VUmc) confirmed that the Medical Research Involving Humans Subjects Act (WMO) does not apply to this study, and an official approval by the MERC is not required. The MERC of VUmc is registered with the US Office for Human Research Protections (OHRP) as IRB00002991. The FWA number assigned to the VUmc is FWA00017598. The data were collected by DESAN Research Solutions (a specialized Dutch agency for collecting, processing, and reporting data for market and opinion research). All employees of DESAN have signed a confidentiality agreement which is included in their employment contract and are in possession of a Certificate of Conduct (VOG). The Computer Aided Instruction (CAI) framework within which the questionnaire is designed is owned by DESAN Research Solutions.DESAN will host the application on its own server clusters in two identical environments. The data will be mirrored between both locations and the locations will act as fail-over for each other. DESAN and both data centers are fully ISO-27001 certified. The research was conducted and delivered completely anonymously. DESAN also had no insight into the identity of the respondents during fieldwork; and the panel administrator had no insight into the answers of the respondents during fieldwork. The data that were provided to the researchers cannot be traced back to natural persons in any way. The results of the research (data and documents) and any other sensitive data were encrypted by DESAN and sent by email, via Cryptshare. Sending sensitive data via Cryptshare guarantees a secure transfer and also means that the relevant files do not end up in different locations (especially, mail servers and their backups), neither at DESAN nor at the client. The research data will be stored by DESAN for at least five years.
: Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.
: All analyses were performed in R, version 4.1.2 []. The main packages used for the IRT analysis were mirt (version 1.36.1) [],