Single-item fatigue measure (Van Hooff)
In plain English
Single-item fatigue measure (Van Hooff) is a single item. What it claims to measure: Momentary (state) subjective fatigue, that is how tired or fatigued a person feels at the moment of measurement, as distinct from chronic fatigue or need for recovery. Licence for an employer or vendor: no formal licence (verified 2026-07-12).
The published evidence is weak for convergent and discriminant validity and responsiveness to change. No published evidence was located for criterion validity against a reference standard, criterion validity against organisational outcomes (absence, turnover, performance) and test-retest reliability: the registry searched and found none in the sweep to date, so if you need those properties evidenced, this instrument does not yet carry them.
Grades summarise the published evidence for this instrument on its own terms; they are not comparable across instruments, and this page makes no recommendation. Whether an instrument fits your workforce is a judgement this registry informs but cannot make. Full evidence, with citations, below. This summary is generated from the record's data, not written by hand.
Identity
Version: A one-item state-fatigue question ('How fatigued do you currently feel?'), used as a momentary rating within daily-diary designs; typically a single response scale administered several times per day.
Structure: 1
Original citation: Van Hooff MLM, Geurts SAE, Kompier MAJ, Taris TW (2007). 'How fatigued do you currently feel?' Convergent and discriminant validity of a single-item fatigue measure. Journal of Occupational Health 49(3):224-234. doi:10.1539/joh.49.224
Steward / publisher: Described in the peer-reviewed literature (Journal of Occupational Health). No commercial test publisher or proprietary distribution product; the item is a generic single question.
Licence status (verified 2026-07-12): No formal instrument licence or fee-based distribution regime exists for the single fatigue item; it is a non-proprietary item used freely in research. The originating article (Van Hooff et al. 2007) is in the Journal of Occupational Health, published by the Japan Society for Occupational Health; that journal applies a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) licence to the works it publishes (this governs the article text, not an instrument licence). Users should attribute Van Hooff et al. 2007; no permission barrier to use the item itself was identified.
Constructs claimed
Momentary (state) subjective fatigue, that is how tired or fatigued a person feels at the moment of measurement, as distinct from chronic fatigue or need for recovery.
Relations to other records
- corresponds with Profile of Mood States, fatigue subscale . Single-item fatigue against the POMS fatigue subscale: r = 0.80 in a Dutch academic-staff diary sample, n = 120 (Van Hooff 2007). Single sample, not replicated; the POMS has no registry record.
Evidence
Structural validity Not applicable (category difference)untestedevidence form: canonical
absence type: category-error the property does not apply to this construct
Not applicable by construction; a single item has no internal factor structure to assess (Van Hooff et al. 2007).
Convergent and discriminant validity Lowthinevidence form: canonical
direct academic staff (flag basis: academic staff)
This is the one property with direct evidence, and it is the record's anchor. In a 9-day daily-diary study of 120 academic staff (three measurements per day), the single-item fatigue measure correlated strongly with the validated multi-item Profile of Mood States fatigue subscale (r=0.80) and with conceptually related daily and global measures (work-home interference, sleep complaints, work-related effort, job pressure), supporting convergent validity. Correlations with conceptually distinct measures (daily work pleasure, job control, social support, motivation to learn) were weak or non-significant, supporting discriminant validity (Van Hooff et al. 2007). Broader single-item methodological work is consistent with single items tracking their multi-item counterparts for concrete states (Fisher, Matthews & Gibbons 2016; Song et al. 2022).
Criterion validity: reference standard Absent (searched; none found in the sweep to date)untestedevidence form: canonical
absence type: population-general searched; none found in the sweep to date
No validation of the single fatigue item against a diagnostic or clinical fatigue reference standard was located in the latest review pass. The validating study used a multi-item mood scale (POMS fatigue) as a convergent comparator, not a diagnostic standard (Van Hooff et al. 2007).
Criterion validity: organisational Absent (searched; none found in the sweep to date)untestedevidence form: canonical
absence type: population-general searched; none found in the sweep to date
No study linking the single fatigue item to work outcomes (sickness absence, turnover, objective performance, diagnosed conditions at work) was located in the latest review pass. The original validation concerned convergent and discriminant validity within a diary design, not prediction of organisational outcomes (Van Hooff et al. 2007). This absence is the finding.
Internal consistency Not applicable (category difference)untestedevidence form: canonical
absence type: category-error the property does not apply to this construct
Not applicable; a single item has no inter-item covariance and no alpha or omega can be computed.
Test-retest reliability Absent (searched; none found in the sweep to date)untestedevidence form: canonical
absence type: population-general searched; none found in the sweep to date
No conventional test-retest coefficient for the single-item fatigue measure was located in the latest review pass. This is expected in part because the item measures a momentary, deliberately fluctuating state, for which high day-to-day stability would not be desired; the validating study modelled within-person daily variation rather than temporal stability (Van Hooff et al. 2007). The absence of any stability coefficient is nonetheless a genuine gap for the instrument, recorded here explicitly rather than papered over.
Measurement invariance Not applicable (category difference)untestedevidence form: canonical
absence type: category-error the property does not apply to this construct
Not applicable in the multi-group confirmatory-factor sense for a single item, and no substantive cross-group comparability evidence (sex, age, occupation, language) for the single fatigue item was located in the latest review pass.
Responsiveness and MIC Very lowthinevidence form: canonical
direct the instrument is fielded only on working populations; the cited studies describe no further sample
The single fatigue item was designed to capture within-day and day-to-day variation, and the diary analysis showed it moved with conceptually related daily variables, which is indirect evidence of sensitivity to change (Van Hooff et al. 2007). However, no formal responsiveness study and no anchored minimal-important-change value were located in the latest review pass, so established responsiveness and minimal important change are Absent.
Populations, languages and norms
Validated in a single sample of Dutch academic staff within a diary design (Van Hooff et al. 2007). No broader population validation, no language-adaptation evidence and no norms were located in the latest review pass. There is no UK working-population evidence for this specific item.
Criticisms and controversies
Beyond the general single-item critique, the specific limitation here is thinness: the psychometric case rests essentially on one 2007 diary study in one occupational group, so external validity is largely unestablished. The item is validated as a momentary state measure, so using it as a general or chronic fatigue indicator, or in single cross-sectional surveys, extends it beyond its evidence. 'Fatigue' also overlaps with sleepiness, need for recovery and emotional exhaustion, and a one-item global rating cannot separate these, which is a construct-clarity concern the wider single-item literature repeatedly raises (Fisher, Matthews & Gibbons 2016).
References (5)
- Van Hooff; Geurts; Kompier et al. (2007). “How Fatigued Do You Currently Feel?” Convergent and Discriminant Validity of a Single‐Item Fatigue Measure https://doi.org/10.1539/joh.49.224
- Fisher; Matthews; Gibbons (2016). Developing and investigating the use of single-item measures in organizational research. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0039139
- Song; Howe; Oltmanns et al. (2022). Examining the Concurrent and Predictive Validity of Single Items in Ecological Momentary Assessments https://doi.org/10.1177/10731911221113563
- Diamantopoulos; Sarstedt; Fuchs et al. (2012). Guidelines for choosing between multi-item and single-item scales for construct measurement: a predictive validity perspective https://doi.org/10.1007/s11747-011-0300-3
- Bergkvist; Rossiter (2007). The Predictive Validity of Multiple-Item versus Single-Item Measures of the Same Constructs https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkr.44.2.175
Record notes
Overall confidence: this is a genuinely thin single-item record and is graded conservatively throughout. The only property with direct primary evidence is convergent/discriminant validity (Low/thin, r=0.80 with POMS fatigue in one N=120 Dutch diary study); reference-standard criterion, organisational criterion and test-retest are all Absent; responsiveness is Very low. That thinness is itself the graded finding, per the honesty rules, rather than a reason to inflate grades. The v0.2 schema handled this cleanly: scale-level properties are marked Not-applicable (single item), and the genuinely missing properties are marked Absent with the absence stated as a finding. The population evidence is a single Dutch academic-staff sample: direct for working adults, but one sample.