Selection of questions to short-form versions of original psychometric instruments in MoBa

By K. Tambs, E. Røysamb. 2014

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Original psychometric instruments are usually too lengthy and space-consuming to be suitable for general population based health studies. Usually, however, they can be abbreviated without losing more measurement precision than what can be accepted in such studies. Here we demonstrate that short-form versions of three instruments which are part of the MoBa study, and which include from one third to half the items in the original versions, correlate from 0.90 to 0.96 with the original version. This means that the short-form versions measure approximately the same characteristics as do the original instruments, and that they can safely be used for research purposes in MoBa. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution Licence, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Psychometric instruments used to measure psychosocial characteristics like behavior, personality, and mental health, usually consist of long lists of questionnaire items. There are thousands of established psychometric instruments available for such purposes, typically with from 10 to several hundred items. The instruments are made so long because each item just covers a small fraction of the sphere of the behavior, trait, or syndrome to be measured. Also the response to each single item will to a large extent reflect random fluctuation, implying that the law of large numbers requires several items with more or less the same meaning to eliminate some of the random errors. Population screening studies with a broad scope of health issues, such as the Norwegian Mother and Child Cohort Study (MoBa), usually do not have questionnaire space for such original instruments, implying that abbreviated instruments must be used. Such shortenings certainly affect the measurement precision, but often the precision remains sufficient for epidemiological purposes. Sometimes copyright interests prohibit reducing the number of items in an established instrument. Whenever possible, long psychometric instruments have been abbreviated in MoBa. Sometimes only judgment based on theoretical or common sense consensus ‐ or on previously published results on the covariance structure of the instrument ‐ has informed the selection of items for short-form instruments. Often, however, already existing data materials with scores from the original instruments have been available. Such data can be used to empirically select the items which in combination give the score that best resembles the score from the full instrument. Some examples of instruments that were abbreviated and used as short-form instruments in MoBa

Subfields: Applied Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Health

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/96f62525e94c39ca106f6a2c16bcfa6a52837a12

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