Introduction to “Advancing quality‑of‑life research by deepening our understanding of response shift”

This month’s issue opens with an article in which Bruce Rapkin and Carolyn Schwartz reflect on the current state-of-play in response shift research and how to move the field forward [1]. The main proposition of the authors is that response shift research and the (statistical) modeling of this phenomenon need to be grounded in an understanding of cognitive appraisal. “(Cognitive) appraisal” as part of the response shift process has previously been detailed in [2] and described as the cognitive processes involved in forming a response to an item eliciting an evaluation of the respondent’s quality of life. In the present commentary, the authors reiterate and specify their argument for the place of the appraisal process in response shift research and suggest four key areas of research and development going forward. These areas cover the questions: (i) which psychological constructs are necessary to adequately describe appraisal processes; (ii) what is the evidential status of the expected scores that we derive from response shift analyses; (iii) how do group-level and individual level conceptualizations and analyses relate to each other; and finally, (iv) whether we should start planning trials in a way that corrects for response shifts. …