Web-based repeated-measures cohorts enable remote, scalable, and temporally structured monitoring of health-related outcomes in naturalistic settings. This paper presents the DiCoBENE study, a web-based cohort of healthcare-track university students, and reports evidence-informed instrument selection together with protocol features and pilot baseline findings. A structured review was used to inform the web-based administration of patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) covering sleep quality, perceived stress, anxiety symptoms, depressive symptoms, and quality of life. In the pilot baseline sample, 442 students constituted the analytic dataset and 370–372 completed the core PROM battery, depending on the instrument. Poor sleep quality, anxiety symptoms, depressive symptoms, and perceived stress were common. Internal consistency was good to excellent for the Generalized Anxiety Disorder 7-item scale (GAD-7), the Patient Health Questionnaire 9-item depression module (PHQ-9), and the 10-item Perceived Stress Scale (PSS-10), and moderate for the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI). Exploratory multivariate analyses, including latent profile analysis, principal component analysis, and partial-correlation network analysis, suggested that baseline heterogeneity was more parsimoniously summarized as a graded multidimensional burden continuum than as sharply separated phenotypes. Taken together, these findings position DiCoBENE as a methodologically explicit framework for web-based repeated outcome assessment in student well-being research.
Maugeri et al. (Fri,) studied this question.