Health Measurement Scales

This is the new edition of the highly successful practical guide for clinicians 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, Third Edition 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 revisions are included, based on the latest research findings. These features combine to provide the most up-to-date guide to measuring scale development available. 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 goes into issues of reliability, generalizability theory, validity, the measurement of change, the cognitive requirements of answering questions, and item response theory. Practical issues cover devising the items,