Health Measurement Scales : A Practical Guide to Their Development and Use

Clinicians and those in health sciences are frequently called upon to measure subjective states such as attitudes, feelings, quality of life, educational achievement and aptitude, and learning style in their patients. This fifth edition of Health Measurement Scales enables these groups to both develop scales to measure non-tangible health outcomes, and better evaluate and differentiate between existing tools.

Health Measurement Scales is the ultimate guide to developing and validating measurement scales that are to be used in the health sciences. The book covers how the individual items are developed; various biases that can affect responses (e.g. social desirability, yea-saying, framing); various response options; how to select the best items in the set; how to combine them into a scale; and finally how to determine the reliability and validity of the scale. It concludes with a discussion of ethical issues that may be encountered, and guidelines for reporting the results of the scale development process. Appendices include a comprehensive guide to finding existing scales, and a brief introduction to exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, making this book a must-read for any practitioner dealing with this kind of data.

David L. Streiner, Director, Kunin-Lunenfeld Applied Research Unit, Assistant Vice-President, Research, Baycrest Centre, and Professor, Department of Psychiatry, University of Toronto, Canada,Geoffrey R. Norman, Assistant Dean, Program for Educational Research and Development, and Professor, Department Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, McMaster University, Canada,John Cairney, Associate Professor, Department of Family Medicine, McMaster University, Canada

David Steiner is a clinical psychologist by training, and currently a Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto and Professor Emeritus in the Department of Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics and in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Neurosciences, both at McMaster University. David is a Senior Scientific Editor of Health Reports, and sits on the editorial boards of four other journals. He has written or edited 9 books, in the areas of statistics, epidemiology, public health, and measurement theory; and have published over 350 articles in these and other areas. David's main interests are quality of life in people with various medical conditions, scale development, research design, treatment of the homeless mentally ill, and woodworking.