What is Validity? A Prologue to an Evaluation of Selected Health Status Instruments

نویسندگان

  • Kaye Brown
  • Colin Burrows
چکیده

The Centre for Health Program Evaluation (previously known as the NHMRC National Centre for Health Program Evaluation) was formed to meet the need for evaluation of health programs and the development of appropriate evaluation methodologies for the Australian context. It seeks to contribute to government policy deliberations and to the national debate on health insurance policy, hospital waiting lists, the cost of new health technologies, the effectiveness of health promotion programs, and many other issues relating to the best use of the nation's health resources. PUBLICATIONS The views expressed in Centre publications are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Centre or its sponsors. Readers of publications are encouraged to contact the author(s) with comments, criticisms and suggestions. A list of the Centre's papers is provided inside the back cover. Further information and copies of the papers may be obtained by contacting: We are grateful to the above funding bodies for their support. We would also like to acknowledge the assistance of Sanya Pahoki, Celia Pollard and Adam Maclagan who diligently tracked down countless references for us. Fay Bower (Librarian, Biomedical Library, Alfred Hospital Branch) provided invaluable help in processing numerous inter-library loan requests and verifying incomplete reference citations. 'Quality of life is some like intelligence. Everyone knows it exists and thinks they can identify it in various ways, but we may not be able to evoke universal agreement on what it is. We are probably better off letting people propose indexes, which we can then use or not use, rather than try to get a multi-individual consensus on what ought to be there. The situation is much easier when we try to create ailment-oriented indexes [i.e., indexes that describe the things doctors observe as direct clinical events in the practice of medicine and in the evaluation of therapy] for clinical work. Because clinicians have good general agreement on the construct called " congestive heart failure, " we might fight about how good a particular index is, but we don't have to fight about the construct itself. Because we do not have unanimous agreement about the construct of quality of life, however, the idea has become a kind of umbrella under which are placed many different indexes dealing with whatever the user wants to focus on.' FEINSTEIN, 1987a 'An instrument, whether it is a test, scale, observation procedure, questionnaire, or interview schedule, only measures …

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تاریخ انتشار 1997