Nondemented patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) and a group of age and education matched controls were administered a modified version of the Visual Search and Attention Test (VSAT). This task measures subjects' speed at localizing letter or symbol targets based on either a single-feature or a dual-feature search. Three indices were derived from the VSAT: (a) the amount of time taken to comp...

BACKGROUND Conceptual equivalence of measures is essential in research that compares health across diverse racial/ethnic groups. Cognitive interviews are pretest methods to explore the conceptual equivalence of survey items. Systematic approaches for using these methods are emerging. OBJECTIVE We describe an interaction analysis (IA) approach using qualitative data analysis software to analyz...

BACKGROUND Greenhalgh et al. used a considerable evidence-base to develop a comprehensive model of implementation of innovations in healthcare organizations [1]. However, these authors did not fully operationalize their model, making it difficult to test formally. The present paper represents a first step in operationalizing Greenhalgh et al.'s model by providing background, rationale, working ...

Observed associations between depression following myocardial infarction (MI) and adverse cardiac outcomes could be overestimated due to patients' tendency to over report somatic depressive symptoms. This study was aimed to investigate this issue with modern psychometrics, using item response theory (IRT) and person-fit statistics to investigate if the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) measures d...

We describe a recommender system which uses a unique combination of content-based and collaborative methods to suggest items of interest to users, and also to learn and exploit item semantics. Recommender systems typically use techniques from collaborative filtering, in which proximity measures between users are formulated to generate recommendations, or content-based filtering, in which users ...

Representation of features of items and user feedbacks that are subjective, incomplete, imprecise and vague, and reasoning about their relationships are major problems in recommender systems. The paper presents a Fuzzy Theoretic Method (FTM) for recommender systems that handles the non-stochastic uncertainty induced from subjectivity, vagueness and imprecision in the data, and the domain knowle...

INTRODUCTION Objective, observational measures of nutrition environments are now well established and widely used. Individuals' perceptions of their nutrition environments may be equally or more important, but are less well conceptualized, and comprehensive measures are not available. This paper describes the development of the Perceived Nutrition Environment Measures Survey (NEMS-P), its test-...

OBJECTIVES Concurrent evaluation of data quality, internal consistency, test-retest reliability and validity of two patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) for measuring functional impairment in hand OA (HOA); the Australian/Canadian Osteoarthritis Hand Index (AUSCAN; 15 items) and the Functional Index of HOA (FIHOA; 10 items). METHODS Patients from an HOA cohort [n=128, mean age 68.6 (s.d....

OBJECTIVE The Child Behavior Checklist is sometimes used to assess sleep disturbance despite not having been validated for this purpose. This study examined associations between the Child Behavior Checklist sleep items and other measures of sleep. METHOD Participants were 122 youth (61% female, aged 7 through 17 years) with anxiety disorders (19%), major depressive disorder (9%), both anxiety...

BACKGROUND Wheelchair mobility skills (WMS) training is regarded by children using a manual wheelchair and their parents as an important factor to improve participation and daily physical activity. Currently, there is no outcome measure available for the evaluation of WMS in children. Several wheelchair mobility outcome measures have been developed for adults, but none of these have been valida...