The SOS-10 is unique among mental health outcome measures in that it does not focus on specific symptoms or disorders but rather asks patients to rate how well they are currently handling a series of important psychological and life challenges.

The primary use of the SOS-10 is to monitor change in a patient’s psychological health over the course of treatment. Additionally, baseline SOS-10 measures can be used to grossly classify a patient’s level of distress that may, in turn, have implications for both the level of care and intensity of service a patient may need.

Test Development, Administration, and Scoring

The SOS-10 was developed through a sophisticated multiphase process that combined expert content generation, patient focus groups, classical test theory procedures, and item response analysis. The contents for the SOS items were derived from interviews with senior members of the Department of Psychiatry at MGH and patient focus groups. The participants in these interviews were asked, “What aspects of life would you expect to improve with successful treatment?” These interviews were analyzed for convergent themes and the resulting thematic material was used to generate the initial SOS-10 item pool. Using both rational and empirical methods, the number of items was reduced to 201 (see Blais, et al., 1999 for a detailed description of the complete test development process).

A one parameter Rasch model was employed to reduce the scale to its final length of 10 items while retaining all the positive characteristics of the 20-item scale. Rasch difficulty (logit) scores were used to position items on the scale, with the items being ordered from the easiest (item 1) to the hardest (item 10) to endorse.

The SOS-10 is suitable for individuals ages 17 and up, and asks patients to rate how they have been doing over the last week.The ten items are scored on a scale from 0 (Never) to 6 (All or nearly all the time), and scoring consists of simply adding the numerical ratings for each item to create a total score. SOS-10 scores range from 0 to 60 with higher scores representing greater psychological well-being and lower scores indicating the patient is acknowledging emotional distress and poorer psychological health. We recommend asking patients to complete the scale prior to the beginning of a treatment appointment as patient ratings might be positively or negatively influenced by their affective state immediately following a treatment session.