Instrument

https://publicschema.org/Instrument

draft

A defined tool used to collect information about a subject: a survey form, questionnaire, screening protocol, or measurement procedure. Instruments are the catalog entries that Profile records reference to declare which tool was administered. Examples include the Washington Group Short Set on Functioning (WG-SS), the UNICEF Child Functioning Module (CFM 2-4, CFM 5-17), a proxy means test questionnaire, the SMART anthropometry protocol, and a national social registry registration form. Instrument entries are persistent registry records, not administration events; a single instrument is typically administered many times.

JSON-LD JSON Schema CSV Definition (Excel) Template (Excel)

Properties

Property Type Definition
Name string
The full display name of the record. Depending on the concept, this is a person's or group's name, or the title of a program, instrument, scoring rule, or software product.
Version string
The version identifier of an artefact such as an instrument, software agent, scoring rule, or privacy notice (for example, a release date such as 2022-10-11 or a semantic version like 6.2).
Publisher concept:Agent includes Person, Organization, SoftwareAgent
The agent that publishes or maintains the instrument, software agent, or scoring rule. Typically an Organization (for example, the Washington Group on Disability Statistics, UNICEF, the SMART initiative, the openIMIS Initiative, or a national statistics office), but may be a named Person for standards methodologies and individual research publications. A SoftwareAgent is not expected to appear here: the publisher of a SoftwareAgent record is the Person or Organization that publishes the software, not another piece of software. The type system admits SoftwareAgent via the Agent supertype, but that case is excluded by convention.
Publication URL uri
A canonical URL where the instrument, software agent, or scoring rule is published (typically a documentation page, a source repository, or a PDF hosted by the publisher).
Item set string
The property IDs that an instrument expects to be populated when administered in full. Declared once on the Instrument registry entry; individual Profile records may override with items_asked when the instrument is deployed in a modular subset.
Language of administration string (language)
The language(s) in which the instrument was administered to the subject. Washington Group analytical guidance notes that translation fidelity affects response patterns and recommends that the language of administration be recorded alongside the responses.

Evidence

Present in 1 of 6 mapped delivery systems.

Only FHIR carries a first-class instrument registry (Questionnaire). DHIS2, OpenCRVS, OpenSPP, openIMIS, and DCI Core do not catalog instruments. In practice, standards bodies publish the instruments themselves (Washington Group, UNICEF MICS, WHO, SMART), and adopters reference them by name and version. This concept gives those references a citable home so Profile records can declare exactly which tool and version produced them.

Standard Equivalent Match
FHIR R4 Questionnaire close
FHIR Questionnaire is the canonical peer for a data-collection instrument; our Instrument also covers measurement protocols and screening forms beyond survey questionnaires

Referenced by this concept

  • FHIR R4 Health Level Seven International (HL7), 2019

See full reference catalogue