Load & Recovery Profile: Methods & Development

What this instrument describes

An original TAP self-report profile for adults aged 18 or older, covering the past seven days. It describes reported demands, recovery opportunities, recovery experiences and everyday functioning. It does not measure whole-body resilience, physiological reserve or allostatic load.

Development version: the content validity, reliability, measurement error, responsiveness and cross-language equivalence of this instrument have not been established. Source frameworks informed the proposed domains; they do not validate these items. No diagnosis, population ranking or clinical decision should be based on the profile.^[1][2][3][4]

The questions and translations were prepared with AI assistance. Target-user interviews and psychometric testing have not yet been completed. The named TAP publication identifies the instrument, not an individual health record.

Interpretation without a total score

For each item, select 0 days, 1–2 days, 3–4 days or 5–7 days; Not sure / prefer not to answer is a separate response. Each item is required to have one of these responses before the report is generated. Skipped items remain explicitly unreported.

The report restates each selected frequency in its original module. It does not average or add items, reverse-score them, assign weights or estimate a total. The response-coverage count is a completion count, not a health score. No cutoffs or normative bands are used.

Demands and recovery opportunities remain contextual descriptions. High demands do not reduce a resilience score; available rest does not prove restored function. Response categories are not biomarkers or percentages of bodily capacity.^[1][2][3]

The comparison for everyday function is the person’s own usual functioning, including longstanding conditions. An unusual week, recall error and current symptoms can affect responses. This profile cannot establish why an experience occurred or predict the response to a future challenge.

Daily observation

The optional diary records one entry per calendar day over fourteen days starting when the user chooses to begin. It asks about that day’s demands, recovery felt at the time of entry, everyday function compared with usual, and an optional event context. Each response is a separate ordinal description; missing values are allowed.

A later entry for the same date replaces that date’s previous entry. Future dates and dates outside the diary are rejected. The display includes observed entries only and never interpolates missing days. Connected points join adjacent observed days; spacing between response categories is illustrative, not a calibrated physiological interval.

No baseline, recovery speed, time constant, recovery deficit or resilience index is calculated. A fourteen-day observation window is a proposed product format, not a validated minimum for measuring resilience. Changes in self-report can reflect many influences and do not establish causation.^[1][3]

The validation pathway

First define the intended construct, population, recall period and use with named scientific and measurement leads. Review relevant instruments and their permissions before adopting any established items; the current TAP wording is newly authored. Use target-user interviews and cognitive interviews to assess relevance, coverage and comprehension, following appropriate content-validity methods.^[4]

Review English and Chinese versions with bilingual subject experts and target users. Translation does not establish equivalence. Pilot recruitment and sample-size planning should follow an explicit analysis plan; there is no universal sample threshold that makes this profile validated.

Specify hypotheses for relationships with appropriate fatigue, sleep and functioning measures; examine missingness, response distributions and potential ceiling/floor effects. Investigate structural validity only for constructs intended as reflective scales. Do not combine formative context variables merely because an internal-consistency statistic improves.

Assess repeatability under genuinely stable conditions and measurement error; distinguish those from real day-to-day change. Evaluate longitudinal responsiveness and any proposed prediction in an independent sample. If a composite is later proposed, justify the weighting, uncertainty and added value; do not infer population percentiles from self-selected website visitors.

Before any research collection, establish a responsible research team, protocol, appropriate ethics review, consent, data minimization, storage, access and deletion rules. Assessment use and any later research opt-in must be separate. This document is a proposed development protocol, not a preregistered or approved study.

Data & privacy

Answers are processed in the browser. The tool has no answer-submission endpoint, account or email field. Viewing the website still involves ordinary hosting requests and server access logs, but questionnaire answers are not placed in URLs or sent with those requests.

The initial profile is held in page memory. Saving on this device or starting the diary explicitly enables local browser storage for this instrument. Saving is optional. It is not an account or cloud backup; others using the same browser may be able to open saved data, and browser-data clearing can remove it.

Resume, text/JSON export, printing and deletion are user-initiated. Deletion removes this tool’s browser record and current in-memory answers; it cannot delete reports the user has already downloaded or printed. This version does not enroll participants or collect research data.

Versioning & responsibility

Instrument wording, options and interpretation rules are versioned together. Changes that affect meaning require a new instrument edition; old records remain accessible. Technical website fixes alone do not establish a new scientific edition.

The tool is provided by The Allostasis Project, founded and supported by Resilio. The profile does not recommend or score products. No source author or institution is represented as endorsing this instrument.

Sources

1. LaVerne Brown, Barbara Cohen, Rebecca Costello, Olga Brazhnik, Zorina Galis (2023). Conceptualizing a resilience research framework at The National Institutes of Health. Stress and Health. https://doi.org/10.1002/smi.3260
2. Sabine Sonnentag, Charlotte Fritz (2007). The Recovery Experience Questionnaire: development and validation of a measure for assessing recuperation and unwinding from work. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1037/1076-8998.12.3.204
3. Michael Kellmann, Maurizio Bertollo, Laurent Bosquet, Michel Brink, Aaron J. Coutts, Rob Duffield, Daniel Erlacher, Shona L. Halson, Anne Hecksteden, Jahan Heidari, K. Wolfgang Kallus, Romain Meeusen, Iñigo Mujika, Claudio Robazza, Sabrina Skorski, Ranel Venter, Jürgen Beckmann (2018). Recovery and Performance in Sport: Consensus Statement. International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance. https://doi.org/10.1123/ijspp.2017-0759
4. COSMIN (n.d.). COSMIN — Improving the selection of outcome measurement instruments. COSMIN. https://www.cosmin.nl/