Evaluating the Effect of Questionnaire Context on the Reporting of Somatic Items Among People With Systemic Sclerosis

There is concern that self-reported depression questionnaires that contain items assessing somatic symptoms may result in biased scores in people with a chronic disease due to symptoms that overlap with their physical disease. However, it has been shown in previous studies that biases associated with somatic items do not affect total depression scores. The reason for this is still unclear but could be associated with the context in which these items are presented. The goal of this experiment is to learn whether the way people with systemic sclerosis answer somatic items on a depression questionnaire is influenced by the fact that they are aware they are being assessed for depressive symptoms. The main question it aims to answer is: Do people with systemic sclerosis score somatic items differently when they are administered outside the context of a depression questionnaire? Participants will be randomly assigned to complete the 8-item Patient Health Questionnaire as part of their routine cohort assessments either with the items in their standard order or with somatic items presented first and separately from psychological items.