The purpose of the proposed research is to increase the number of valid and reliable measure available to study fatigue in diverse groups of cancer patients. The method is a psychometric assessment of two fatigue scales in four samples of cancer patients who are undergoing chemotherapy and/or radiation therapy. The samples will consist of two rural samples and two urban samples. The two scales are the Fatigue Severity Scale (FSS) and the Visual Analogue Scale for Fatigue (VAS-F). Reliability of the FSS and VAS-F will be assessed by Cronbach's alpha. Three aspects of validity will be assessed for the FSS and the VAS-F. Convergent validity of the scales will be assessed by correlation the VAS-F with the FSS. Administering the VAS-F and the FSS to a group of 20 healthy persons matched for gender and age with the cancer patients will assess validity from contrasting groups. Factor analysis will be used to assess the construct validity of the two scales.
