Focus on psychometrics single‐item indicators in nursing research

Abstract

Single-item indicators that ask respondents for their global rating of a specific concept are congruent with nursing's emphasis on wholism and individualism. They allow the subject to take personally salient features of the situation into account when providing a response. The psychometric performance of single-item indicators in published research and in a sample data set using measures of the mother's choice and satisfaction with her employment decision support the validity and reliability of the measures, suggesting that these indicators deserve more attention in nursing research. Recommendations for the use of single-item indicators are provided.The purpose of this article is to explore the use of single-item indicators in nursing research. Single-item indicators can be classed into two fundamentally different groups. In the first group are single-item instruments that were designed as single-item measures. These measures generally are used to obtain the subject's perception of particular dimensions of multidimensional concepts or of an overall concept. Global single-item measures allow the subject to define the concept in a way that is personally meaningful, providing a measure that can be responsive to individual differences. Global single-item indicators require that subjects consider all aspects of a phenomenon, ignore aspects that are not relevant to their situations, and differentially weight the other aspects according to their values and ideals in order to provide a single rating. They represent a holistic way to measure subjects' perceptions of many concepts that are of interest to nursing and are consistent with nursing's perspective. Whenever nurse researchers are interested in individuals' perceptions of a particular situation, perhaps in order to predict their behavior, a global single-item indicator may be a more valid measure of the concept of interest.The second group consists of single-item indicators that were designed as part of a multiitem scale. These single-item measures often are used in a particular study when the multiitem scale does not perform satisfactorily or as proxy measures for a concept that seems important in understanding the findings but that was not measured in a systematic way. The problem with this practice lies in the way multi-item measures are constructed. Items in a multi-item instrument generally are chosen so that each represents one aspect of the concept, with the goal of adequately sampling from the domain of possible items (Nunnally, 1978). Although this strategy is appropriate and important to the construction of a multi-item scale, it means that a composite of the items is necessary in order to validly measure the concept. Using one item originally designed as part of a multi-item scale may not provide a complete picture of the concept. NIH-PA Author ManuscriptA study of single-versus multi-item measures serves as an example of this problem. Bukowski, Ferber-Goff, and Newcomb (1990) measured antisocial behavior in school children with five items, eac...

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