Intervals between response choices on a single-item measure of quality of life.

BACKGROUND: A single overall rating of quality of life (QoL) is a sensitive method that is often used in population surveys. However, the exact meaning of response choices is unclear. In particular, uneven spacing may affect the way QoL ratings should be analyzed and interpreted. This study aimed to determine the intervals between response choices to a single-item QoL assessment. METHODS: A secondary analysis was conducted on data from the Lc65+ cohort study and two additional, population-based, stratified random samples of older people (N = 5,300). Overall QoL was rated as excellent, very good, good, fair or poor. A QoL score (range 0-100) was derived from participants' answers to a 28-item QoL assessment tool. A transformed QoL score ranging from 1 (poor) to 5 (excellent) was calculated. The same procedure was repeated to compute seven domain-specific QoL subscores (Feeling of safety; Health and mobility; Autonomy; Close entourage; Material resources; Esteem and recognition; Social and cultural life). RESULTS: Mean (95 % confidence intervals) QoL scores were 96.23 (95.81-96.65) for excellent, 93.09 (92.74-93.45) for very good, 81.45 (80.63-82.27) for good, 65.44 (62.67-68.20) for fair and 54.52 (45.31-63.73) for poor overall QoL, corresponding to transformed QoL scores of respectively 5.00, 4.70, 3.58, 2.05, and 1.00. Ordinality of the categories excellent to poor was preserved in all seven QoL subscores. CONCLUSIONS: The excellent-to-poor rating scale provides an ordinal measure of overall QoL. The intervals between response choices are unequal, but an interval scale can be obtained after adequate recoding of excellent, very good, good, fair and poor.

Cognitive coherence in the evluation of a novel single item

Article published in Judgement and Decision-Making

Validation of a single item to assess daytime sleepiness for the Swiss Transplant Cohort Study

Context-Daytime sleepiness in kidney transplant recipients has emerged as a potential predictor of impaired adherence to the immunosuppressive medication regimen. Thus there is a need to assess daytime sleepiness in clinical practice and transplant registries.Objective-To evaluate the validity of a single-item measure of daytime sleepiness integrated in the Swiss Transplant Cohort Study (STCS), using the American Educational Research Association framework.Methods-Using a cross-sectional design, we enrolled a convenience sample of 926 home-dwelling kidney transplant recipients (median age, 59.69 years; 25%-75% quartile [Q25-Q75], 50.27-59.69), 63% men; median time since transplant 9.42 years (Q25-Q75, 4.93-15.85). Daytime sleepiness was assessed by using a single item from the STCS and the 8 items of the validated Epworth Sleepiness Scale. Receiver operating characteristic curve analysis was used to determine the cutoff for the STCS daytime sleepiness item against the Epworth Sleepiness Scale score.Results-Based on the receiver operating characteristic curve analysis, a score greater than 4 on the STCS daytime sleepiness item is recommended to detect daytime sleepiness. Content validity was high as all expert reviews were unanimous. Concurrent validity was moderate (Spearman ϱ, 0.531; P< .001) and convergent validity with depression and poor sleep quality although low, was significant (ϱ, 0.235; P<.001 and ϱ, 0.318, P=.002, respectively). For the group difference validity: kidney transplant recipients with moderate, severe, and extremely severe depressive symptom scores had 3.4, 4.3, and 5.9 times higher odds of having daytime sleepiness, respectively, as compared with recipients without depressive symptoms.Conclusion-The accumulated evidence provided evidence for the validity of the STCS daytime sleepiness item as a simple screening scale for daytime sleepiness.

A comparison of the Yale-Brown obsessive compulsive scale for "Heavy drinking" with a single item craving measure: Construct validity and clinical utility

The measurement of alcohol craving began with single-item scales. Multifactorial scales developed with the intention to capture more fully the phenomenon of craving. This study examines the construct validity of a multifactorial scale, the Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale for heavy drinking (Y-BOCS-hd). The study compares its clinical utility with a single item visual-analogue craving scale. The study includes 212 alcohol dependent subjects (127 males, 75 females) undertaking an outpatient treatment program between 1999-2001. Subjects completed the Y-BOCS-hd and a single item visual-analogue scale, in addition to alcohol consumption and dependence severity measures. The Y-BOCS-hd had strong construct validity. Both the visual-analogue alcohol craving scale and Y-BOCS-hd were weakly associated with pretreatment dependence severity. There was a significant association between pretreatment alcohol consumption and the visual-analogue craving scale. Neither craving measure was able to predict total program abstinence or days abstinent. The relationship between obsessive-compulsive behavior in alcohol dependence and craving remains unclear.

Measuring the Big Five with single items using a bipolar response scale

The convergence on the Big Five in personality theory has produced a demand for efficient yet psychometrically sound measures. Therefore, five single-item measures, using bipolar response scales, were constructed to measure the Big Five and evaluated in terms of their convergent and off-diagonal divergent properties, their pattern of criterion correlations and their reliability when compared with four longer Big Five measures. In a combined sample (N?=?791) the Single-Item Measures of Personality (SIMP) demonstrated a mean convergence of r?=?0.61 with the longer scales. The SIMP also demonstrated acceptable reliability, self–other accuracy, and divergent correlations, and a closely similar pattern of criterion correlations when compared with the longer scales. It is concluded that the SIMP offer a reasonable alternative to longer scales, balancing the demands of brevity versus reliability and validity.

Diagnostic errors and repetitive sequential classifications in on-line process control by attributes

The procedure of on-line process control by attributes, known as Taguchi`s on-line process control, consists of inspecting the mth item (a single item) at every m produced items and deciding, at each inspection, whether the fraction of conforming items was reduced or not. If the inspected item is nonconforming, the production is stopped for adjustment. As the inspection system can be subject to diagnosis errors, one develops a probabilistic model that classifies repeatedly the examined item until a conforming or b non-conforming classification is observed. The first event that occurs (a conforming classifications or b non-conforming classifications) determines the final classification of the examined item. Proprieties of an ergodic Markov chain were used to get the expression of average cost of the system of control, which can be optimized by three parameters: the sampling interval of the inspections (m); the number of repeated conforming classifications (a); and the number of repeated non-conforming classifications (b). The optimum design is compared with two alternative approaches: the first one consists of a simple preventive policy. The production system is adjusted at every n produced items (no inspection is performed). The second classifies the examined item repeatedly r (fixed) times and considers it conforming if most classification results are conforming. Results indicate that the current proposal performs better than the procedure that fixes the number of repeated classifications and classifies the examined item as conforming if most classifications were conforming. On the other hand, the preventive policy can be averagely the most economical alternative rather than those ones that require inspection depending on the degree of errors and costs. A numerical example illustrates the proposed procedure. (C) 2009 Elsevier B. V. All rights reserved.

Effects of the preventive and corrective adjustments in economical designs for online process control for attributes with misclassification errors

The procedure for online process control by attributes consists of inspecting a single item at every m produced items. It is decided on the basis of the inspection result whether the process is in-control (the conforming fraction is stable) or out-of-control (the conforming fraction is decreased, for example). Most articles about online process control have cited the stoppage of the production process for an adjustment when the inspected item is non-conforming (then the production is restarted in-control, here denominated as corrective adjustment). Moreover, the articles related to this subject do not present semi-economical designs (which may yield high quantities of non-conforming items), as they do not include a policy of preventive adjustments (in such case no item is inspected), which can be more economical, mainly if the inspected item can be misclassified. In this article, the possibility of preventive or corrective adjustments in the process is decided at every m produced item. If a preventive adjustment is decided upon, then no item is inspected. On the contrary, the m-th item is inspected; if it conforms, the production goes on, otherwise, an adjustment takes place and the process restarts in-control. This approach is economically feasible for some practical situations and the parameters of the proposed procedure are determined minimizing an average cost function subject to some statistical restrictions (for example, to assure a minimal levelfixed in advanceof conforming items in the production process). Numerical examples illustrate the proposal.

Economic design of an X chart for short-run production

The aim of this paper is to present an economical design of an X chart for a short-run production. The process mean starts equal to mu(0) (in-control, State I) and in a random time it shifts to mu(1) > mu(0) (out-of-control, State II). The monitoring procedure consists of inspecting a single item at every m produced ones. If the measurement of the quality characteristic does not meet the control limits, the process is stopped, adjusted, and additional (r - 1) items are inspected retrospectively. The probabilistic model was developed considering only shifts in the process mean. A direct search technique is applied to find the optimum parameters which minimizes the expected cost function. Numerical examples illustrate the proposed procedure. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Religion is good, belief is better: religion, religiosity, and substance use among young swiss men.

We examined the influence of religious denomination (RD) and religiosity/spirituality on licit and illicit substance use beyond the potential impact of parental variables. Data from a representative sample of Swiss men (n = 5,387) approximately 20 years old were collected between August 2010 and November 2011. We asked single item questions about RD and religious self-description (RSD) (including aspects of spirituality). Alcohol use, smoking, and illicit drug use was measured as outcome variables. Logistic regressions (adjusting for parenting and socioeconomic background) revealed that religiosity/spirituality was inversely associated with substance use and that it was more strongly associated than denomination. RD, particularly having no denomination, was independently associated with the use of most substances. The study's limitations, and the implications for future work are noted.

PACIC Instrument: disentangling dimensions using published validation models.

OBJECTIVE: To better understand the structure of the Patient Assessment of Chronic Illness Care (PACIC) instrument. More specifically to test all published validation models, using one single data set and appropriate statistical tools. DESIGN: Validation study using data from cross-sectional survey. PARTICIPANTS: A population-based sample of non-institutionalized adults with diabetes residing in Switzerland (canton of Vaud). MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE: French version of the 20-items PACIC instrument (5-point response scale). We conducted validation analyses using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). The original five-dimension model and other published models were tested with three types of CFA: based on (i) a Pearson estimator of variance-covariance matrix, (ii) a polychoric correlation matrix and (iii) a likelihood estimation with a multinomial distribution for the manifest variables. All models were assessed using loadings and goodness-of-fit measures. RESULTS: The analytical sample included 406 patients. Mean age was 64.4 years and 59% were men. Median of item responses varied between 1 and 4 (range 1-5), and range of missing values was between 5.7 and 12.3%. Strong floor and ceiling effects were present. Even though loadings of the tested models were relatively high, the only model showing acceptable fit was the 11-item single-dimension model. PACIC was associated with the expected variables of the field. CONCLUSIONS: Our results showed that the model considering 11 items in a single dimension exhibited the best fit for our data. A single score, in complement to the consideration of single-item results, might be used instead of the five dimensions usually described.

Hyperventilation complaints in music performance anxiety among classical music students.

Objective: Despite the importance of respiration and hyperventilation in anxiety disorders, research on breathing disturbances associated with hyperventilation is rare in the field of music performance anxiety (MPA, also known as stage fright). The only comparable study in this area reported a positive correlation between negative feelings of MPA and hyperventilation complaints during performance. The goals of this study were (a) to extend these previous findings to the period before performance, (b) to test whether a positive correlation also exists between hyperventilation complaints and the experience of stage fright as a problem, (c) to investigate instrument-specific symptom reporting, and (d) to confirm gender differences in negative feelings of MPA and hyperventilation complaints reported in other studies. Methods: We assessed 169 university students of classical music with a questionnaire comprising: the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory for negative feelings of MPA, the Nijmegen Questionnaire for hyperventilation complaints, and a single item for the experience of stage fright as a problem. Results: We found a significant positive correlation between hyperventilation complaints and negative feelings of MPA before performance and a significant positive correlation between hyperventilation complaints and the experience of stage fright as a problem. Wind musicians/singers reported a significantly higher frequency of respiratory symptoms than other musicians. Furthermore, women scored significantly higher on hyperventilation complaints and negative feelings of MPA. Conclusion: These results further the findings of previous reports by suggesting that breathing disturbances associated with hyperventilation may play a role in MPA prior to going on stage. Experimental studies are needed to confirm whether hyperventilation complaints associated with negative feelings of MPA manifest themselves at the physiological level. (C) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

The relationship between a short measure of health status and physical activity in a workplace population.

Many interventions promoting physical activity (PA) are effective in preventing disease onset, and although studies have found a positive relationship between health-related quality of life (HRQL) and PA, most of these studies have focused on older adults and those with chronic conditions. Less is known regarding the association between PA level and HRQL among healthy adults. Our objective was to analyse the relationship between PA level and HRQL among a sample of 573 employees aged 20-68 taking part in a workplace intervention to promote PA. Measures included HRQL (using a single item) and PA (i.e. Godin Leisure-Time Questionnaire). The Modified Canadian Aerobic Fitness Test (MCAFT) was also completed by 10% of the employees. MET-minute scores (assessing energy expenditure over one week) were compared across HRQL categories using ANOVA. A multiple linear regression analysis was conducted to further examine the relationship between HRQL and PA, controlling for potential covariates. Participants in the higher health status categories were found to report higher levels of energy expenditure (one-way ANOVA, p < 0.001). In the multiple linear regression model, each unit increase in health status level translated in a mean increase of 356 MET-minutes in energy expenditure (p < 0.001). This single-item assessment of health status explained six percent of the variance in energy expenditure. The study concludes that higher energy expenditure through PA among an adult workplace population is positively associated with increased health status, and it also suggests that a single-item HRQL measure is suitable for community- and population-based studies, reducing response burden and research costs.

Experience of meaning in life in bereaved informal caregivers of palliative care patients.

PURPOSE: Providing care for terminally ill family members places an enormous burden on informal caregivers. Meaning in life (MiL) may be a protective factor, but is jeopardised in caregiving and bereavement. This study evaluates the following questions: To what extent do bereaved informal caregivers of palliative care (PC) patients experience meaning in their lives? What differences emerge in carers compared to the general German population? How does MiL relate to well-being in former caregivers? METHODS: Eighty-four bereaved PC caregivers completed the Schedule for Meaning in Life Evaluation, the Brief Symptom Inventory, the WHOQOL-BREF, a single-item numerical rating scale of quality of life, and the Satisfaction with Life Scale. The experience of MiL of bereaved caregivers was compared to a representative population sample (n=977). RESULTS: The overall MiL fulfillment of bereaved caregivers (69 % female, age 55.5 ± 12.9 years) was significantly lower than in the general population (68.5 ± 19.2 vs. 83.3 ± 14, p<.001), as was the overall importance ascribed to their meaning framework (76.6 ± 13.6 vs. 85.6 ± 12.3, p< .001). PC caregivers are far more likely to list friends, leisure, nature/animals, and altruism. Higher MiL was correlated with better life satisfaction and quality of life. CONCLUSION: Coping with the loss of a loved one is associated with changes in MiL framework and considerably impairs a carer's experience of MiL fulfillment. Individual MiL is associated with well-being in PC caregivers during early bereavement. Specific interventions for carers targeted at meaning reconstruction during palliative care and bereavement are needed to help individuals regain a sense of meaning and purpose.

3D-robottipoimintajärjestelmän kehittäminen

Lasertekniikkaa hyödyntävä 3D-kuvaustekniikka tuo uusia mahdollisuuksia robotilla suoritettavaan kasastapoimintaan. Kasasta otetun syvyyskuvan avulla tuotteista voidaan määrittää perinteisen XY-paikkatiedon lisäksi tuotteen korkeus- ja asentotieto. Näitä uusia ominaisuuksia hyödyntämällä robotilla voidaan suorittaa yksittäisen tuotteen poiminta kasasta eri korkeuksilta ja eri asennoista. Diplomityö kuuluu osana Master Automation Groupin ensimmäiseen 3D-tekniikkaan perustuvaan MAG PixCell 3D -robosoituun kappaleenkäsittelysoluun. Työn tavoitteena on kehittääsyvyyskuvan käsittelyyn algoritmeja, joiden avulla robotilla voidaan poimia yksitellen kasassa olevia metallisia saksen teriä. Algoritmien tarkoituksena on varmistaa kasasta löydettyjen terien poimittavuus sekä määrittää poimittavien terien korkeudet ja asennot. Tarkastusten jälkeen robotille välitetään terien XYZ-koordinaatti- ja asentotiedot.