BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Recent guidelines from the Association of American Medical Colleges and from the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education strongly suggest that communications teaching and assessment be part of medical education at all levels. This study's objective was to validate an instrument to assess communications skills. This instrument, Common Ground, is linked to t...

MODIS has 20 reflective solar bands (RSB), covering the VIS, NIR, and SWIR spectral regions. They are calibrated onorbit using a solar diffuser (SD) panel, made of space-grade Spectralon. The SD bi-directional reflectance factor (BRF) was characterized pre-launch by the instrument vendor with reference to the NIST reflectance standard. Its on-orbit degradation is tracked by an on-board solar di...

PURPOSE We developed and validated a reliable, responsive multidimensional instrument to measure disease specific health related quality of life in bladder cancer survivors treated with local cancer therapy. MATERIALS AND METHODS Instrument content was based on qualitative information obtained from a panel of bladder cancer providers and from patient focus groups. Draft items were piloted and...

BACKGROUND To assess maternal confidence in her ability to cope with labor, a measure of childbirth self efficacy is necessary. OBJECTIVES This paper aims to assess the cultural adaptation and psychometric testing of the short form of childbirth self-efficacy Inventory among Iranian pregnant women. PATIENTS AND METHODS In this descriptive-methodological study, we investigated 383 Iranian pr...

This study attempted to develop a standardized instrument for assessment of prosocial reasoning in Chinese populations. The Prosocial Reasoning Objective Measure (PROM) was translated, and a two-stage study was conducted to evaluate the psychometric properties of the translated instrument. The content validity, cultural relevance, and reading level of the translated instrument were evaluated by...

PURPOSE This study explores parental grief on the death of a child of any age. STUDY DESIGN The sampling frame for the study consisted of 74 respondents reporting that they experienced the death of a living child. With the exception of standard demographic measures, the quantitative and qualitative items in the instrument were designed specifically for this project. The content validity of th...

BACKGROUND Among the current instruments used to assess stair ambulation, none were observed that specifically evaluated the quality of movement or biomechanical strategies adopted by stroke patients. OBJECTIVE To evaluate the content validity of a clinical instrument designed to identify the qualitative and kinematic characteristics and strategies adopted by stroke patients during stair asce...

OBJECTIVE To develop a patient safety culture instrument for use in Chinese hospitals, we assessed the appropriateness of existing safety culture questionnaires used in the USA and Japan for Chinese respondents and identified new items and domains suitable to Chinese hospitals. DESIGN Focus group study. SETTING AND PARTICIPANTS Twenty-four physicians, nurses and other health-care workers fr...

INTRODUCTION OBJECTIVES The aim of this work was to adapt and validate into Spanish the Semi-Structured Interview for Psychological Autopsy (SSIPA). METHOD The SSIPA consists of 69 items distributed into four modules: precipitants and/or stressors, motivation, lethality, and intentionality. The original instrument was translated from Portuguese into Spanish and backtranslated by bilinguals...

INTRODUCTION Nurses' Caring behaviors might be affected by many variables. The aim of this study was to develop and test a valid and reliable questionnaire to specify these determinants. METHODS Both qualitative and quantitative methods were applied to develop the questionnaire. The development process of the instrument was conducted in three phases. The first phase consisted of four steps: i...