Patient Health Questionnaire-15

PHQ-15

health sciencespsychologyFree for research use

Permission: Free for research use. Free for non-commercial academic research, with no license fee. Cite the original publication.

A 15-item measure of somatic symptom burden covering the most prevalent physical complaints in primary care, over the past four weeks.

Items

Response format

3-point severity scale (0-2)

Version

1.0

Ready-to-cite methods sentence

Somatic symptom severity was measured with the PHQ-15 (Kroenke et al., 2002), a 15-item scale with acceptable internal consistency (α ≈ .80); scores of 5, 10, and 15 mark low, medium, and high symptom burden.

Citing this in a methods section? This scale spans more than one discipline, so the style depends on where you publish. See the APA 7 or Vancouver guides, or compare all six citation styles.

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Reliability & validation

Validation population

Primary care and obstetrics-gynecology patients (Kroenke et al., 2002)

Cronbach's α

0.80

Response anchors

Not bothered at all · Bothered a little · Bothered a lot

Known limitations

Measures symptom burden regardless of medical cause, so an elevated score does not imply a somatoform disorder; one item (menstrual problems) is omitted for men, slightly changing the maximum.

Original citation

Kroenke, K., Spitzer, R. L., & Williams, J. B. W. (2002). The PHQ-15: Validity of a new measure for evaluating the severity of somatic symptoms. Psychosomatic Medicine, 64(2), 258-266.

https://doi.org/10.1097/00006842-200203000-00008

Questions researchers ask

What does the PHQ-15 measure?

A 15-item measure of somatic symptom burden covering the most prevalent physical complaints in primary care, over the past four weeks.

How many items does the PHQ-15 have?

The Patient Health Questionnaire-15 (PHQ-15) has 15 items.

Is the PHQ-15 free to use?

The PHQ-15 is free to use for non-commercial academic research. You don't need to pay a license fee, but you should always cite the original publication.

Is the PHQ-15 reliable?

Validation studies report Cronbach's α of 0.80. See the reliability section for the population studied and full statistics.

Who developed the PHQ-15, and how do I cite it?

Kroenke, K., Spitzer, R. L., & Williams, J. B. W. (2002). The PHQ-15: Validity of a new measure for evaluating the severity of somatic symptoms. Psychosomatic Medicine, 64(2), 258-266. https://doi.org/10.1097/00006842-200203000-00008

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Library entry verified September 2026. Metadata is provided for reference. Questionnaires are built in Folio Surveyor, subject to each instrument's licensing, and can be taken to Qualtrics, Google Forms or Microsoft Forms, with their CSV responses brought back for scoring.