The aim of this 2 day course is to provide participants with an introduction to psychometrics as applied to health. It will cover the core psychometric and statistical methods used in scale construction and the development of multi-item patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs). Sessions will be delivered by external staff Professor Jakob Bue Bjorner - Optum Patient Insights and Georgina Jones - Leeds becket University, who have an international reputation in psychometric methods and questionnaire development, analysis and interpretation and ScHARR Staff Anju Keetharuth. The course will be interactive and practical. Sessions will be delivered using lectures and individual and small group practical exercises using real world examples.

Who will benefit from this course?

The course content is aimed at participants with no prior knowledge of psychometrics or those who wish to refresh and gain more theoretical and practical knowledge in this area. The course content is set at a basic/intermediate level. It will focus on classical methods of test construction and test of differential item function, but will also provide an introduction to modern psychometric methods such as Rasch models, item response theory and factor analysis for categorical data. It will be relevant to researchers, students, clinicians and other health care professionals and members of the pharmaceutical industry interested in using or developing PROMs.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this course participants should be able to:

• Identify the key stages involved in scale construction and development
• Understand the qualitative process involved in the development of a PROM and item generation
• Describe the different ways of scoring and scaling a PROM and the theory underpinning these
• Understand exploratory (EFA) and confirmatory (CFA) factor analysis and be able to carry out EFA using SPSS
• Understand what is meant by reliability, validity, and responsiveness and be able to analyse and interpret these using SPSS
• Explore the above concepts using datasets from a range of existing disease-specific and generic PROMs
• Be aware of the use of different software other than SPSS where applicable.

Course Materials

Course Materials will be provided via a Delegate Course Website approximately 2 weeks prior to the course start date. Hard copies of exercises will be provided throughout the course. Hard copies of powerpoint presentations will not be provided, but these can be printed by delegates before the start of the course via the Delegate Course Website.

Participants are asked to supply their own Laptop throughout the course. Participants will work on laptops using SPSS during the course.  Working knowledge of SPSS would be beneficial but is not essential. If you do not have access to SPSS on your laptop, then a link to download will be provided prior to starting the course.

Further Learning (PART 2 Advanced)

An advanced course will be run immediately following on from this course (Wednesday, 22nd - Friday, 24th May 2019), which will cover Rasch models, item response theory, confirmatory factor analysis and factor analysis for categorical data in more detail using MPlus software. 

Furthers details of PART 2 Advanced can be found here:

Course Faculty

Anju Keetharuth is the Course Leader for this course.

Jakob Bjorner

Georgina Jones

Contact

For further information please do not hesitate to contact us via email at scharr-scu@sheffield.ac.uk

or call +44 (0)114 222 2968.