Single-item measures
A single question is what an organisation can field every month. This page gathers every single-item record in the registry, what each has been shown to screen for, and the published correspondence with the full instrument.
A single item cannot carry internal consistency or structural validity; those properties are category errors for it and are recorded as not applicable, never as absent. What a single item can carry, and what these records grade, is test-retest reliability, criterion validity and convergent validity against a multi-item instrument for the same construct. Where a published study reports that correspondence, it is recorded as a relation with the study cited: screens for where the study reports sensitivity and specificity against the instrument's threshold, corresponds with where it reports a correlation only (convergence, which is not a screening claim), and short form of where the item was derived from the instrument.
Work Ability Score (WAS), single-item
What it claims to measure: Global self-assessed current work ability relative to lifetime best.
- short form of Work Ability Index (WAI). Single item against the full index: Spearman rs = 0.63 in 12,389 workers (El Fassi 2013); convergent validity of the single item confirmed in Swedish working samples (Ahlstrom 2010). Head-to-head, the single item discriminates less well than the full index for future sickness absence: AUC 0.67 against 0.78 (Roelen 2014). Recorded as fact; the registry does not say which form an implementer should use.
Single-item overall job satisfaction (Wanous tradition)
What it claims to measure: Global (overall) job satisfaction, that is a person's summary evaluative judgement of their job as a whole, captured in one question rather than by aggregating facet items.
- corresponds with Multi-item overall job satisfaction scales (pooled across scales) . Meta-analytic correlation between single-item and multi-item overall job satisfaction measures: r = 0.63 uncorrected, 0.67 corrected, N = 7,682 (Wanous 1997); single-item facet measures against the Job Descriptive Index facets 0.60 to 0.72 (Nagy 2002). No single multi-item job-satisfaction scale has a registry record yet; the relation targets the pooled multi-item literature and will be re-pointed when one is admitted.
Single-item perceived stress measure (Elo tradition, SISQ)
What it claims to measure: Perceived psychological stress / stress symptoms, that is subjectively experienced tension, restlessness, nervousness, anxiety or difficulty sleeping attributed to worry, captured in a single global self-rating.
- screens for General Health Questionnaire-12 (GHQ-12). The single-item job-stressfulness measure against GHQ-12 caseness: sensitivity and specificity at or above 70 percent at a cut-off of 4 or more on the 5-point scale in high-strain occupational groups, N = 20,658 (Houdmont 2021). The validation is of the job-stressfulness wording, not the general stress-symptom wording on this record; the two are close variants. The record notes the wording distinction.
Single-item fatigue measure (Van Hooff)
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.
- 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.
Single items still to enter
Stage two of the field adds the well-evidenced single items that have been validated against a multi-item instrument for the same construct: the single-item burnout measure (validated against the Maslach emotional-exhaustion scale) and the single-item work-engagement measure (validated against the UWES). Each enters through the same admission rule; single items have exactly the measurement-property literature the rule asks for.