36-Item Short Form Survey (SF-36)

As part of the Medical Outcomes Study (MOS), a multi-year, multi-site study to explain variations in patient outcomes, RAND developed the 36-Item Short Form Health Survey (SF-36) in 1992. SF-36 is a set of generic, coherent, and easily administered quality-of-life measures. These measures rely upon patient self-reporting and have been widely used.

While the SF-36 is provided for public use under certain terms and conditions, we also refer users to the PROMIS measures, available at https://www.healthmeasures.net/, which have been more recently developed and updated.

Available Documents

• Terms and Conditions for Using the SF-36

  Learn more about how to use SF-36.

• MOS 36-Item Short Form Survey Instrument (SF-36) (HTML)

  View and print the English version of SF-36.

• MOS 36-Item Short Form Survey Instrument (SF-36) (Arabic PDF)

  View and print the PDF Arabic version of SF-36.

• Scoring Instructions for MOS 36-Item Short Form Survey Instrument (SF-36)

  Instructions on how to score SF-36.

Related Reading

More Information about Summary Scores

For those interested in information about the physical and mental health summary scores and the work done to create a single score, we suggest the following articles:

• What is the Relationship Between the Minimally Important Difference and Health State Utility Values? The Case of the SF-6-D 2003

  Stephen J. Walters, John E. Brazier

  Health and Quality of Life Outcomes, Vol. 1, No. 1, p. 4.

• The Estimation of a Preference-based Measure of Health from the SF-36 2002

  John E. Brazier, Jennifer Roberts, Mark Deverill

  Journal of Health Economics, Vol. 21, No. 2, pp. 271-292.

• Mapping the SF-12 to the EuroQol EQ-5D Index in a National US Sample 2004

  Peter Franks, Erica I. Lubetkin, Marthe R. Gold, Daniel J. Tancredi, Haomiao Jia

  Medical Decision Making, Vol. 24, No. 3, pp. 247-254.