Health Measurement Scales: A practical guide to their development and use

This book is a useful resource that should have a fairly broad appeal for researchers needing to develop new measurement scales, researchers who need to critically appraise literature concerned with measurement tools, and anyone interested in an accessible overview of important measurement issues and methods. (The Canadian Journal of Psychiatry)

The text is well laid out with chapters covering basic concepts, devising the items, scaling responses, methods of administration and ethical considerations being easy to read. (Occupational Medicine)

This is a book that can be used as a key reference book by those who wish to study qualitative change in health status by the use of scales. (Occupational Medicine)

Clinicians and those in health sciences are frequently called upon to measure subjective states such as attitudes, feelings, quality of life, educational achievement and aptitude, and learning style in their patients. This fourth edition of Health Measurement Scales enables these groups, who often have limited knowledge of statistics, to both develop scales to measure non-tangible health outcomes, and better evaluate and differentiate between existing tools.

It covers how the individual items are developed; various biases that can affect responses (eg social desirability, yea-saying, framing); various response options; how to select the best items in the set; how to combine them into a scale; and then how to determine the reliability and validity of the scale. It concludes with a discussion of ethical issues that may be encountered, and guidelines for reporting the results of the scale development process. Appendices include a comprehensive guide to finding existing scales, and a brief introduction to exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis. It synthesizes the theory of scale construction with practical advice, making it the ultimate guide to how to develop and validate measurement scales that are to be used in the health sciences.