Abstract
Objective
Health anxiety by proxy is a newly introduced term to describe parents’ experience of excessive and unpleasant worries about their child’s health. This article describes the development of a new measure, the Health Anxiety by Proxy Scale (HAPYS), for systematic assessment of health anxiety by proxy.
Method
The development of the HAPYS was performed over three phases. (1) Patients clinically assessed to have health anxiety by proxy participated in semi-structured interviews to elaborate their experience of worries regarding their child's health and their related behaviours, and to examine the face validity of items in an existing questionnaire: ‘Illness Worry Scale – parent version’. (2) Based on the findings from Phase 1 the project group and a panel of experts selected and formulated questionnaire items and scoring formats. (3) The HAPYS was pilot-tested twice using cognitive interviewing with healthy parents and parents with health anxiety by proxy followed by further adjustments.
Results
The final version of HAPYS consists of 26 items characteristic of health anxiety by proxy and of an impact section with six items.
Conclusion
Based on the pilot testing the HAPYS showed good face and content validity. It holds the potential to be a valid questionnaire to help clinicians across health care settings assess parents suffering from health anxiety by proxy.
Acknowledgement
The authors would like to thank the parents who participated in the study and acknowledge MD, PhD, Ditte Roth Hulgaard (DRH) for her part in the data analysis in phase 1.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Author note
My co-authors and I do not have any conflicts of interests to disclose. All of the authors listed in the byline have agreed to the order of the byline and to submission of the manuscript.
Correction Statement
This article was originally published with errors, which have now been corrected in the online version. Please see Correction (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08039488.2023.2258044)