BACKGROUND The Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-Being Scale (WEMWBS) was developed to meet demand for instruments to measure mental well-being. It comprises 14 positively phrased Likert-style items and fulfils classic criteria for scale development. We report here the internal construct validity of WEMWBS from the perspective of the Rasch measurement model. METHODS The model was applied to data ...

PURPOSE To assess and validate the subscale structure of the 28-item Impact of Visual Impairment (IVI) Scale by using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and Rasch analysis for use as an outcome measure. METHODS Three hundred nineteen participants completed the IVI questionnaire, and the responses then were subjected to Rasch analysis by RUMM2020 software. With the person estimates for each it...

BACKGROUND The mini-Mental Adjustment to Cancer Scale (mini-MAC) is a well-recognised, popular measure of coping in psycho-oncology and assesses five cancer-specific coping strategies. It has been suggested that these five subscales could be grouped to form the over-arching adaptive and maladptive coping subscales to facilitate the interpretation and clinical application of the scale. Despite t...

OBJECTIVE Mental illness is prevalent among general hospital ward patients but often goes unrecognised. The aim of this study was to validate the SCL-8d as a brief questionnaire for mental disturbances for use in general hospitals. METHODS The study included 2040 patients, 18 years or older, consecutively admitted to 11 general internal medicine wards in seven European countries. All patients...

BACKGROUND The Patient Rated Elbow Evaluation (PREE) was developed as an elbow joint specific measure of pain and disability and validated with classical psychometric methods. More recently, Rasch analysis has contributed new methods for analyzing the clinical measurement properties of self-report outcome measures. The objective of the study was to determine aspects of validity of the PREE usin...

BACKGROUND The Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D) is a measure of depressive symptomatology which is widely used internationally. Though previous attempts were made to shorten the CES-D scale, few have attempted to develop a Computerized Adaptive Test (CAT) version for the CES-D. OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to provide evidence on the efficiency and accuracy of t...

A powerful theoretical framework for exploring recognition memory is the global matching framework, in which a cue's memory strength reflects the similarity of the retrieval cues being matched against the contents of memory simultaneously. Contributions at retrieval can be categorized as matches and mismatches to the item and context cues, including the self match (match on item and context), i...

The purpose of this ITEMS module is to provide an introduction to Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) estimation for item response models. A brief description of Bayesian inference is followed by an overview of the various facets of MCMC algorithms, including discussion of prior specification, sampling procedures, and methods for evaluating chain convergence. Model comparison and fit issues in the ...

A confirmatory factor analysis was conducted using AMOS 4.0 to validate the 21item Career Factors Inventory on a community college student sample. The multidimensional inventory assesses types and levels of career indecision antecedents. The sample consisted of 512 ethnically diverse freshmen students; 46% were men and 54% were women. Participants ranged in age from 16 to 50 (M = 19.3, SD = 3.4...

The Atkinson-Shiffrin (1968) model, the de facto standard model of short term memory cited thousands of times, fits the characteristically bowed free recall curves from Murdock (1962) well. However, it is long overdue to note that it is not a theoretically convincing explanation and that it does not fit all of the experimental relationships in the Murdock data. To obtain a qualitatively correct...