Personal Functional Goals: A New Approach to Assessing Patient-Centered Outcomes

One dilemma in outcomes research is finding measures that show the impact of an intervention on participants' quality of life, especially in areas most salient to participants. The authors describe the development and testing of a method for eliciting information about personal functional goals from older adults entering an exercise program and assessing progress after completion of the program. The authors' Personal Functional Goals (PFG) Checklist and Interview Protocol is a 45-item checklist of goals for health, daily living, and general well-being. Testing on older adult, community-dwelling participants in controlled exercise intervention studies confirmed the ease of administration and provided preliminary evidence of reliability and validity, including responsiveness to change. Thus, the PFG shows promise for measuring health-related quality of life in terms of individual concerns and is suitable for application in clinical and research settings.