BACKGROUND Unambiguous interpretation of ordered rating scale response categories requires distinct meanings of category labels. Also, summation of item responses into total scores assumes equal intervals between categories. While studies have identified problems with rating scale response category functioning there is a paucity of empirical studies regarding how respondents interpret response ...

In this study, we investigated how students’ claim, justification, uncertainty, and conditions of rebuttal contribute to the measurement of the overall scientific argumentation ability. We designed six sets of items, each of which consisted of claim, justification, uncertainty rating, and conditions of rebuttal items. These item sets addressed six investigations related to climate change and ex...

BACKGROUND Recent systematic reviews have demonstrated that pain associated with knee osteoarthritis (OA) is a complex phenomenon that involves various contributors. People with knee OA exhibit symptoms of impaired body-perception, including reduced tactile acuity, impairments in limb laterality recognition, and degraded proprioceptive acuity. The Fremantle Back Awareness Questionnaire (FreBAQ)...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE The Nottingham Extended Activities of Daily Living (EADL) Scale is frequently used in clinical practice and research in rehabilitation to assess patients’ independence in activities of daily living. Summative scores are used for this purpose, but this is problematic because the EADL is an ordinal level measurement scale. OBJECTIVES To examine the fit of data to the Rasc...

OBJECTIVES The aim of this study was to develop and validate a questionnaire designed to measure the impact of sleep impairment on emotional distress in patients with various sleep disorders. METHODS Five experts created an item data-bank pertaining to sleep-related psychological symptoms and somatic perceptions. Fifty patients in two focus groups examined each item for: a) word clarity (indi...

INTRODUCTION The Skin Self-Examination Attitude Scale (SSEAS) is a brief measure that allows for the assessment of attitudes in relation to skin self-examination. This study evaluated the psychometric properties of the SSEAS using Item Response Theory (IRT) methods in a large sample of men ≥ 50 years in Queensland, Australia. METHODS A sample of 831 men (420 intervention and 411 control) comp...

In their seminal work on characterizing the manifest probabilities of latent trait models, Cressie and Holland give a theoretically important characterization of the marginal Rasch model. Because their representation of the marginal Rasch model does not involve any latent trait, nor any specific distribution of a latent trait, it opens up the possibility for constructing a Markov chain - Monte ...

Historically, job analysis has played a fundamental role for developing and validating licensure and certification examinations. Still, research on what constitutes reliable and valid job analysis data is lacking. This paper illustrates several ways to examine the reliability and validity of job analysis survey results. Generalizability theory and the many-facets Rasch model are applied to inve...