Comparison of UK and US methods for weighting and scoring the SF-36 summary measures

It is suggested that it may be necessary to weight the PCS and MCS using only the original US algorithms, which will lead to more uniform analysis of datasets and may also lead to greater uptake of the summary measures. Furthermore, the results would suggest that in international trials the SF-36 can be adopted and summary scores calculated for countries where no large-scale normative dataset is available. However, further research is needed to determine that the similarity of results gained using UK and US algorithms is not an idiosyncratic feature of the UK data. Studies to verify the findings reported here are required from other countries.