Health measurement scales : a practical guide to their development and use / David L. Streiner and Geoffrey R. Norman.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Streiner, David L.

Contributor:

Norman, Geoffrey R.

Series:

Oxford medical publications

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Health surveys.

Health status indicators--Measurement.

Health status indicators.

Public health--Evaluation.

Public health.

Medical care--Evaluation.

Medical care.

Epidemiologic Methods.

Health Status Indicators.

Health Surveys.

Medical Subjects:

Epidemiologic Methods.

Health Status Indicators.

Health Surveys.

Physical Description:

xii, 283 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.

Edition:

Third edition.

Place of Publication:

Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2003.

Summary:

This is the new edition of a highly successful practical guide for clinicians who are developing tools to measure subjective states, attitudes, or non-tangible outcomes in their patients. It is widely used by people from many disciplines, who have only a limited knowledge of statistics. This thoroughly updated edition of Health measurement scales gives more details on cognitive requirements in answering questions, and how this influences scale development. There is now an expanded discussion of generalizability theory, a completely revised chapter on item response theory, and many other revisions, based on the latest research findings.

These features combine to provide the most up-to-date guide to developing health measurement scales. It synthesizes the theory of scale construction with practical advice, culled from the literature and the authors' experience, about how to develop and validate measurement scales to be used in the health sciences. The theory includes issues of reliability, validity, the measurement of change, and the cognitive requirements of answering questions. Practical issues covered include devising the items, biases that may affect the responses, pre-testing, weeding out poorly performing items, combining items into scales, setting cut points, and the practical issues of using scales in various ways such as face-to-face interviews, mailed or telephone-administered surveys, and over the internet. There is also a chapter about some of the ethical issues that scale developers and users should be aware of. Appendices lead the reader to other readings, sources of already developed scales and items, and a very brief introduction to exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis.

Contents:

Searching the literature 4

The two traditions of assessment 9

3 Devising the items 14

The source of items 15

Content validity 19

Generic versus specific scales and the 'fidelity versus bandwidth' issue 22

Translation 23

4 Scaling responses 29

Categorical judgements 30

Continuous judgements 32

To rate or to rank 53

Multidimensional scaling 54

5 Selecting the items 61

Interpretability 61

Face validity 66

Frequency of endorsement and discrimination 67

Homogeneity of the items 68

Multifactor inventories 73

When homogeneity does not matter 74

6 Biases in responding 80

The differing perspectives 80

Answering questions: the cognitive requirements 81

Optimizing and satisficing 84

Social desirability and faking good 85

Deviation and faking bad 89

Yea-saying or acquiescence 92

End-aversion, positive skew, and halo 93

Framing 95

Biases related to the measurement of change 96

7 From items to scales 102

Weighting the items 102

Multiplicative composite scores 105

Transforming the final score 108

Percentiles 109

Standard and standardized scores 111

Age and sex norms 113

Establishing cut points 115

8 Reliability 126

Philosophical implications 128

Defining the reliability of a test 130

Other considerations in calculating the reliability of a test 133

Other types of reliability 137

Different forms of the reliability coefficient 138

Issues of interpretation 142

Improving reliability 146

Standard error of the reliability coefficient and sample size 148

9 Generalizability theory 153

G studies 155

D studies 155

Example 1 Therapists, occasions, and patients 156

D study examples 160

Example 2 Items, observers, and stations (the OSCE) 162

Example 3 Econometric vs. psychometric perspectives on the utility of health states 164

Perspective 1 Econometric 166

Perspective 2 Psychometric 166

Perspective 3 Experimental 166

General rules for generalizability 167

Nested designs 170

Error estimates for G coefficients 170

10 Validity 172

Why assess validity? 172

Reliability and validity 173

The 'types' of validity 174

Content validity 175

Criterion validity 176

Construct validity 178

Responsiveness and sensitivity to change 186

Validity and 'types of indices' 186

Biases in validity assessment 187

Changes in the sample 192

11 Measuring change 194

The goal of measurement of change 194

Why not measure change directly? 195

Measures of association

reliability and sensitivity to change 196

Difficulties with change scores in experimental designs 201

Change scores and quasi-experimental designs 202

Measuring change using multiple observations: growth curves 204

How much change is enough? 209

12 Item response theory 213

Item characteristic curves 214

The one-parameter model 216

The two- and three-parameter models 217

Polytomous models 218

Item fit 220

Person fit 222

The standard error of measurement 222

Sample size 222

Advantages 223

Disadvantages 224

Computer programs 225

13 Methods of administration 228

Face-to-face interviews 228

Telephone questionnaires 231

Mailed questionnaires 234

The necessity of persistence 239

Computer-assisted administration 241

Using e-mail and the Web 243

14 Ethical considerations 248

C A (very) brief introduction to factor analysis 265.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and indexes.

ISBN:

0198528477

OCLC:

52784698