SSS-8: Somatic Symptom Burden Norms from a Representative German Sample

A 2021 representative German community sample of 2,515 individuals (51.6% female, aged 16–101) provides updated population norms for the Somatic Symptom Scale-8 (SSS-8). The dataset likely contains survey responses for the SSS-8 and related measures (PHQ-2, GAD-2, WHO-5, UCLA-3) used to evaluate psychometric properties and health care utilization. Sören Kliem published the data under a CC-BY-4.0 license on figshare.

Use Cases

• Establishing clinical reference norms based on the representative German sample.
• Evaluating construct validity based on latent correlations with depression, anxiety, well-being, and loneliness measures.
• Predicting health care utilization based on SSS-8 scores using regression models.
• Testing measurement invariance across demographic groups based on gender and age.
• Comparing somatic symptom burden trends based on a cross-cohort analysis with a 2012 sample.

Strengths

• Data is from a large, representative sample of 2,515 individuals.
• High internal consistency reported (ω = .922).
• Includes a direct comparison with a 2012 normative sample (N = 2,484).
• Construct validity evaluated with multiple established measures (PHQ-2, GAD-2, WHO-5, UCLA-3).

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• The dataset is small (970.4 KB), indicating limited scope or aggregated summary data.

Provenance

Source

figshare

Collection Method

Survey of a representative German community sample.

Time Range

2021

Freshness

Last updated 2026-05-22 05:34:50; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Germany