Expanding hospital capacity by developing an observation unit may be an important strategy in congested hospitals. Understanding the principles for evaluating the potential impact and appropriate sizing of an observation unit is important. The objective of this paper is to contrast two approaches to determining observation unit sizing and profitability, real options, and a flow analysis based o...

BACKGROUND Elderly social isolation could be prevented by facilitating communication or mutual helping at the neighborhood level. The helping of elderly neighbors by local volunteers may relate to their community commitment (CC), but ways to measure CC have not been identified. The aim of the present study was to develop a Community Commitment Scale (CCS) to measure psychological sense of belon...

BACKGROUND General, health-related quality-of-life questionnaires and recovery-specific questionnaires have been used to measure recovery in surgical patients. The aim of this study was to evaluate the clinimetric properties of 3 recovery instruments and to examine whether recovery-specific instruments are useful. METHODS The Quality of Recovery-40 (QoR-40), Recovery Index-10 (RI-10), and RAN...

The psychometric properties of the d2 Selective Attention Test are analyzed in two samples of premature ( n = 63) and born-at-term ( n = 78) children. The reliability coefficients (internal consistency) reached values of around .90. Principal components analysis revealed a three-factor structure, which accounts for 58% of the variance, and thus coincides with the number of factors presented in ...

The Implicit Association Test (IAT) was adapted to measure anxiety by assessing associations of self (vs. other) with anxiety-related (vs. calmness-related) words. Study 1 showed that the IAT-Anxiety exhibited good internal consistency and adequate stability. Study 2 revealed that the IAT-Anxiety was unaffected by a faking instruction. Study 3 examined the predictive validity of implicit and ex...

BACKGROUND The objective structure clinical examination (OSCE) has been used since the early 1970s for assessing clinical competence. There are very few studies that have examined the psychometric stability of the stations that are used repeatedly with different samples. The purpose of the present study was to assess the stability of objective structured clinical exams (OSCEs) employing the sam...

OBJECTIVES Drawing from collective efficacy and social disorganization theories, we developed and validated measures of neighborhood-level social processes. METHODS Data came from 2 large, population-based cohort studies of urban-dwelling older adults, the Chicago Neighborhood and Disability Study (CNDS, n = 3,882) and the Baltimore Memory Study (BMS, n = 1,140). Data on neighborhood social p...

OBJECTIVE To develop and assess the psychometric properties of a pictorial version of the Pediatric Asthma Quality of Life Questionnaire (PAQLQ). METHODS A pictorial PAQLQ was administered to 101 children with mild to severe asthma between 5 and 7 years of age. A subgroup of 48 children followed longitudinally completed the established version of the PAQLQ. RESULTS A confirmatory factor ana...

The aim of this study was to develop and validate three instruments which measure knowledge about searching for and critically appraising scientific articles (evidence-based practice-EBP). Twentythree questions were collected from previous studies and modified by an expert panel. These questions were then administered to 55 delegates before and after two international conferences in EBP; the re...

Self-efficacy is an important trait that factors into a teacher’s ability to effectively teach writing. Teacher’s self-efficacy in writing, however, has been widely ignored by the writing research community. This study developed a new instrument to measure a teachers’ writing self-efficacy and examined its psychometric properties. The Writing Self-Efficacy Instrument demonstrated factorial scor...