The Revised Illness Perception Questionnaire (IPQ-R)

TLDR

The authors developed a revised Illness Perception Questionnaire (IPQ‑R) to address psychometric issues and add subscales for cyclical timeline, illness coherence, and emotional representations. They selected items using principal components analysis, confirming the questionnaire’s factorial structure in a sample of 711 patients across eight illness groups. The revised IPQ‑R showed strong internal consistency, stable short‑ and long‑term test–retest reliability, and sound discriminant, known‑group, and predictive validity, making it a comprehensive and psychometrically sound tool for assessing illness perceptions.

Abstract

This paper presents a revised version of the Illness Perception Questionnaire (IPQ-R), a recently developed and widely used quantitative measure of the five components of illness representations in Leventhal's self-regulatory model. The revised version stemmed from a need to deal with minor psychometric problems with two subscales, and to include additional subscales, assessing cyclical timeline perceptions, illness coherence, and emotional representations. Item selection was determined by principal components analyses which verified the factorial structure of the questionnaire in a sample of 711 patients from 8 different illness groups. Further analysis provided good evidence for both the internal reliability of the subscales and the short (3 week) and longer term (6 month) retest reliability. The IPQ-R also demonstrated sound discriminant, known group and predictive validity. While it is possible that the new subscales will vary in their applicability in different patient groups, the IPQ-R provides a more comprehensive and psychometrically acceptable assessment of the key components of patients' perceptions of illness.