Recommendations for reporting the results of studies of instrument and scale development and testing

Abstract

Scales and instruments play an important role in health research and practice. It is important that studies that report on their psychometric properties do so in a way such that readers can understand what was done and what was found. This paper is a guide to writing articles about the development and assessment of these tools. It covers what should be in the abstract and how key words should be chosen. The article then discusses what should be in the main parts of the paper: the introduction, methods, results and discussion. In each of these parts, it suggests the statistical tests that should be used and how to report them. The emphasis throughout the paper is that reliability and validity are not fixed properties of a scale, but depend on an interaction among it, the population being evaluated and the circumstances under which the instrument is administered.Keywords: diagnostic tests, instrument development, nursing assessment, psychometric testing, research methods, statistics Classifications, scales and standardized assessment instruments form an integral part in nursing research and practice. On the ward or in a clinic, they are used to measure phenomena such as pain (Stinson et al. 2008), quality of life (Dolan 1997), dyspnoea (Stenton 2008) and a host of other subjective states that would be difficult to assess in any other way. They can be used to help in diagnosing some disorder (Stice et al. 2000), assessing the degree to which the patients' problems are interfering with their lives (Devins et al. 2001), or tracking how much they improve or do not improve after some intervention (Kells et al. 2013). Additionally, a wide range of risk assessment instruments are used to quantify degrees of susceptibilities of complex phenomena like pressure ulcers (Kottner & Balzer 2010) or the risk of falling (Kehinde 2009). In research settings, scales and instruments are often the primary outcome measure and the success or failure of an intervention is often determined on the basis of differences between groups on some scale (Sawatzky et al. 2013). Those who develop scales have more than risen to the challenge. The most recent edition of the Mental Measurements Yearbook (www.ebscohost.com) lists over 3,000 commercially available scales and this is dwarfed by the number of instruments that have not been published, which is at least four times larger (Goldman & Mitchell 2008). The good news is that it is possible to find an existing scale to measure almost any outcome of interest. The bad news is that it is difficult to evaluate many of these measures because their psychometric properties -that is, their reliability and validityare not adequately reported.Over the years, several guidelines have been written to assist authors who are reporting on the development of new These three standards are essential readings for anyone who wants to publish a paper reporting on the development or investigation of scales or instruments. However, it should be noted that there are situations, especially in health and nursing re...

Measuring Message Credibility

“…For this study, in particular, we wanted to determine how well the measures reflected the underlying concept of message credibility, not just how consistent they were with each other. Streiner and Kottner (2014) refer to these as validity studies rather than reliability studies: "Validity studies are tests of hypotheses; e.g. scores will differ between different groups, or will change in response to some intervention, or are correlated (or not) with scores on another test" (p. 1973).…”

Sağlik Çalişanlarinin Kadina Yöneli̇k Eş Şi̇ddeti̇ Bi̇ldi̇ri̇mi̇ Yapma Ni̇yeti̇/Davranişi Ölçeği̇ Geçerli̇k Ve Güveni̇li̇rli̇k Çalişmasi

“…Örneklem sayısının belirlenmesi konusunda literatürde, faktör analizi için denek sayısının 100'ün altına inmemesi önerilmekte ve 200 denek sayısı "orta", 300 denek sayısı "iyi", 500 denek sayısı "çok iyi", 1000 ise "mükemmel" olarak değerlendirilmektedir (Kline 1994;Bryman and Cramer 2001;Tavşancıl 2014;Streiner and Kottner 2014).…”

How Likely Is It for a Nurse Student to Become a Competent Nurse? A Protocol for Scale Development and Validation Using a Mixed Methods Study

“…The lowest acceptable value of Cronbach's α for developed tools is 0.80, whereas the acceptable value for instruments in early developmental stages is 0.70 (42,45). Since the scales comprising more than 15 items may exaggerate the alpha value, the mean interitem correlation and the mean item-partial total correlation will be assessed if necessary (46).…”