This came up recently and I hadn’t really thought it through before. In general, see FAQ 12 “What changes can you make to a CORE measure and what would need a special licence from us” we require that the text of the instrument is unchanged which includes making the copyright line visible to end users but we had accepted that the layout would change in only and particularly online responsive versions to be read on smartphones or wherever item-by-item presentation is adopted. The question that came up was about whether it was OK to change the use of capitalisation, bold face or other formatting to emphasise the “over the last week” (or “over the last seven days” in some languages) when presenting item-by-item. The answer is that it is OK. The layout and typography was quite carefully chosen for the paper/PDF versions where the instruments are presented by page so that, in the measures, “over the last week” is clearly emphasised.
That does make that time frame pretty clear to end users (whether they pay attention to it, and if so, how, is of course unknown and a lovely topic for research which, to my knowledge has never been explored for CORE or any other questionnaires). The question was about whether to use bold when presenting item-by-item as here.
That’s not the bold version, that’s the person contacting me helping me see what was in question.
So I think now the official CST guidance is that you can use formatting and typography however you like as long as you are being sensible about keeping the intentions of the original formatting of the paper, by page, versions of the instrument. I think this is the same principle as we apply to omitting or changing the demographic information box see here (which I have now tweaked to address formatting).
Created 15/10/26. Text and header image (“rules, rules, rules” from Avignon, France): CE and licenced under the Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) which applies to all posts and pages (but is different from the licence for the instruments!!)
