Neurobehavioral Functioning Inventory (NFI)
What It Measures
The NFI asks about the everyday problems that follow a brain injury — not what shows on a scan, but what the person and their family are actually living with. Forgetting conversations, losing their temper, feeling hopeless, struggling to find words, moving clumsily.
Seventy-six statements are rated for how often each happens, from never to always. The first six are critical items: symptoms like seizures or suicidal thoughts that flag a need for immediate attention and sit outside the scales. The remaining seventy form six independent scales — depression, somatic, memory and attention, communication, aggression, and motor. Parallel patient and family forms mean the same person can be described from two perspectives and the gap examined.
Further Reading
Additional Notes
Licensing Notes: Record forms and report usages are consumables. Reproduction requires Pearson permission.
Learn More: Item counts per scale: depression 13, somatic 11, memory/attention 19, communication 10, aggression 9, motor 8. Two things worth knowing. The Depression scale has been validated as a standalone screen — mapped against Beck Depression Inventory categories, it correctly classified 81% of people with minor depression and 87% with clinical depression in a sample of 172 TBI outpatients. And a systematic review found the Aggression subscale did not correlate with its reference measure, so that scale carries less weight than the others.
