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 fourth edition of Health Measurement Scales enables these groups who often have limited knowledge of statistics, to both develop scales to measure non-tangible health outcomes, and better evaluate and differentiate between existing tools.

It covers how the individual items are developed; various biases that can affect responses (eg 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 then 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. It synthesizes the theory of scale construction with practical advice, making it the ultimate guide to how to develop and validate measurement scales that are to be used in the health sciences.

David Streiner attended the City College of New York, and then did his graduate work in clinical psychology at Syracuse University. In 1968, he joined the newly-formed Department of Psychiatry at McMaster University, and became the Chief Psychologist at the McMaster University Medical Centre. In 1980, he also became a member of the Department of Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics at McMaster, and was the Deputy Chair of CE&B for two years. He was one of the founding editors of Evidence-based Mental Health, and is currently editor of the Statistical Developments and Applications section of the Journal of Personality Assessment, as well as being on the editorial board of numerous other journals.
Geoff Norman attended the University of Manitoba as an undergraduate, graduating with an honours degree in physics in 1965. He did graduate work in nuclear physics, obtaining a PhD in 1970. At that point he began a career in health sciences education, and subsequently obtained an M.A. in educational psychology from Michigan State University in 1977. He joined the faculty at McMaster in 1977, and has remained at McMaster for the next three decades. He has won numerous awards in medical education, including the Hubbard Award of the National Board of Medical Examiners (US), and lifetime achievement awards from the Medical Council of Canada and the American Educational Research Association, among others. In 2001, he was awarded a Canada Research Chair. In 2007, he was elected to the Royal Society of Canada. He has published over 200 papers in education, epidemiology, psychiatry and physics, as well as authoring and editing several books.