The population of Japan is aging rapidly, and maintaining the quality of life of elderly people has become an important issue in contemporary Japan. This study was conducted to verify the validity of the self-administered visual analogue scale (VAS) for assessing the health status of elderly people. A survey was conducted in two villages in western Japan in 2003. A total of 2040 participants, a...

Most of the research related to Non Functional Requirements (NFRs) have presented NFRs frameworks by integrating non functional requirements with functional requirements while we proposed that measurement of NFRs is possible e.g. cost and performance and NFR like usability can be scaled. Our novel hybrid approach integrates three things rather than two i.e. Functional Requirements (FRs), Measur...

Reviewers of research reports frequently criticize the choice of statistical methods. While some of these criticisms are well-founded, frequently the use of various parametric methods such as analysis of variance, regression, correlation are faulted because: (a) the sample size is too small, (b) the data may not be normally distributed, or (c) The data are from Likert scales, which are ordinal,...

INTRODUCTION Pain is the most common complaint of patients referring to emergency department (ED). Considering the importance of pain management in ED, this study aimed to investigate the efficacy and feasibility of ultrasound-guided nerve blocks in this setting. METHODS 46 patients who came to the ED with injured extremities were enrolled in the study and received either femoral, axillary or...

Likert scales are routinely used in educational and psychological research as measures of constructs of interest. If sound scale development procedures are followed, the resulting scale can reliably and validly measure a construct. However, if a given scale is used to make comparisons among different populations of respondents (e.g., cultures; Riordan & Vandenberg, 1994), over time in longitudi...

Personality measurement is based on the idea that values on an unobservable latent variable determine the distribution of answers on a manifest response scale. Typically, it is assumed in the Item Response Theory (IRT) that latent variables are related to the observed responses through continuous normal or logistic functions, determining the probability with which one of the ordered response al...