2.3.3. The Short-Form-36 Health Survey (SF-36)

We used both the five-item mental health and the four-item vitality subscale of the Italian version of the Short-Form-36 Health Survey [32], a general measure of population distress. One example of a mental health subscale item is "Have you felt so down in the dumps that nothing could cheer you up?". One item example of the vitality subscale is "Did you feel tired?". Each item is scored on a five-point Likert scale having anchors from 1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree. We computed the total score by averaging the participants' scores for the mental health scale (Cronbach α = 0.80) and for the vitality scale (Cronbach α = 0.75).
