This essay describes Rasch analysis psychometric techniques and how such techniques can be used by life sciences education researchers to guide the development and use of surveys and tests. Specifically, Rasch techniques can be used to document and evaluate the measurement functioning of such instruments. Rasch techniques also allow researchers to construct "Wright maps" to explain the meaning ...

BACKGROUND The Psychiatric Out-Patient Experiences Questionnaire (POPEQ) is an 11-item core measure of psychiatric out-patients experiences of the perceived outcome of the treatment, the quality of interaction with the clinician, and the quality of information provision. The POPEQ was found to have evidence for reliability and validity following the application of classical test theory but has ...

OBJECTIVE Social withdrawal is described as the condition in which an individual experiences a desire to make social contact, but is unable to satisfy that desire. It is an important issue for patients with motor neurone disease who are likely to experience severe physical impairment. This study aims to reassess the psychometric and scaling properties of the MND Social Withdrawal Scale (MND-SWS...

PURPOSE To analyze the validity of the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS) among Chinese cataract population. METHODS A total of 275 participants with unilateral or bilateral cataract were recruited to complete the Chinese version of HADS. The patients' demographic and ophthalmic characteristics were documented. Rasch analysis was conducted to examine the model fit statistics, the th...

We propose a faceted classification scheme for web queries. Unlike previous work, our functional scheme ties its classification to actionable strategies for search engines to take. Our scheme consists of four facets of ambiguity, authority sensitivity, temporal sensitivity and spatial sensitivity. We hypothesize that the classification of queries into such facets yields insight on user intent a...

The Brunnstrom recovery stages (the BRS) consists of 2 items assessing the poststroke motor function of the upper extremities and 1 assessing the lower extremities. The 3 items together represent overall motor function. Although the BRS efficiently assesses poststroke motor functions, a lack of rigorous examination of the psychometric properties restricts its utility. We aimed to examine the un...

A simple procedure to tighten the Lagrangian bounds is proposed. The approach is interpreted in two ways. First, it can be seen as a reformulation of the original problem aimed to split the resulting Lagrangian problem into two subproblems. Second, it can be considered as a search for a tighter estimation of the penalty term arising in the Lagrangian problem. The new bounds are illustrated by a...

BACKGROUND Aging has determined a demographic shift in the world, which is considered a major societal achievement, and a challenge. Aging is primarily a subjective experience, shaped by factors such as gender and culture. There is a lack of instruments to assess attitudes to aging adequately. In addition, there is no instrument developed or validated in developing region contexts, so that the ...