Evaluation & the Health Professions

This review aims to identify self-report instruments examining aspects of transition to parenthood for use in practice and research. After performing a literature search in Embase, Medline, Web of Science, Cochrane, PsycINFO and Google Scholar, the Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs) measuring (aspects of) transition to parenthood during pregnancy or up to 1-year postpartum were identified. Following COSMIN guidelines for systematic reviews on PROMs, the quality of the PROM development and PROM content validity was evaluated...

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The Pain Resilience Scale (PRS) is a useful tool that evaluates behavioral engagement and adaptively regulates cognitions and emotions despite the pain. This study aimed to translate the PRS to Turkish and investigate its psychometric properties. The Turkish version of PRS was completed online by 332 healthy adults, and a subset of 105 respondents was re-assessed after 7-14 days. The reliability of the adapted measure was evaluated in terms of internal consistency, relative, and absolute test-retest reliability...

The modified Dynamic Gait Index (mDGI) is one of the valid instruments used in the evaluation of gait disorders. This study aimed to translate the mDGI into Turkish and evaluate the evidence for its reliability and validity for use in an elderly population. For test-retest reliability, the mDGI was administered twice, and for inter-rater reliability, the mDGI was administered alone on the same day by two raters. Concurrent validity of the mDGI was assessed using Pearson's correlation analysis between the Turkish version of the mDGI score and the Timed Up and Go (TUG), Berg Balance Scale (BBS), and 10-m Walk Test (10-MWT), respectively...

The implementation of continuing education programs for pharmacists in Lebanon is emerging and needs to be further developed and strengthened to fill the gaps between knowledge acquisition and its application in the workplace. This study examined the perceptions of pharmacist preferences for and barriers to access programs. A crosssectional descriptive study was undertaken with a convenience sample of 142 pharmacists who were surveyed in their workplace. Almost 83.1% of pharmacists reported their day-to-day workplace experiences were the best way to learn...

Time-series intervention designs that include two or more phases have been widely discussed in the healthcare literature for many years. A convenient model for the analysis of these designs has a linear model part (to measure changes in level and trend) plus a second part that measures the random error structure; the error structure is assumed to follow an autoregressive time-series process. Traditional generalized linear model approaches widely used to estimate this model are less than satisfactory because they tend to provide substantially biased intervention tests and confidence intervals...

COVID-19 rapidly spread across the world, constituting a public health disaster unlike any other experienced in decades. The impact exerted on workplaces and their employees was dramatic, and an immense burden fell on healthcare provision globally. Along with "front-line" healthcare staff, sanitation workers at hospitals also had to cope with additional workloads, making them vulnerable to psychological trauma and affecting their quality of life at establishments. This study investigated how the factors of occupational stress, self-efficacy (belief in the capacity to carry out a task well) and mental health altered the WRQoL (Work-Related Quality of Life) of employees carrying out sanitation duties at hospitals in Malaysia...

Nurses' professional values are closely associated with their ethical sensitivity and the quality of nursing care. The aim of this study was to determine surgical nurses' perceptions of their professional values, ethical sensitivities and quality of care, the relationship between these variables, and the factors influencing these. The sample of this cross-sectional, descriptive and relational study consisted of 231 nurses working in the surgical units of two university hospitals and a training and research hospital...

Posttraumatic growth (PTG) represents positive changes following a trauma, crisis, and/or psychologically distressing event. Experiencing cancer can serve as a traumatic event for patients, resulting in life changes among survivors. Various PTG measures have been used to assess post-cancer change among childhood cancer survivors (CCS), but few have been evaluated for use in this population. This study examined the factor structure of an adapted, 11-item version of the Posttraumatic Growth Inventory (PTGI) among CCS...

The study aimed to analyze the psychometric properties of a newly developed Chinese screening tool, the Chinese Version of the Speech Disorders in Parkinson's Disease Questionnaire (SDPD-C). The SDPD-C contains a 24-item questionnaire with four assessment domains. Overall, 93 patients with idiopathic Parkinson's disease (PD) (age 70.1 ± 8.9 years) and 76 healthy older adults (age 67.2 ± 8.1 years) participated in the psychometric analysis study. The internal consistency of the SDPD-C was .91 (four dimensions: ...

The objective was to assess active ingredients, change mechanisms, and fidelity in interventions aiming to increase the quality of smoking cessation care in the Dutch primary healthcare setting. We conducted a systematic review searching five scientific databases on August 2nd, 2019, updated on October 28th, 2021. We included effect data of behavioural interventions aiming at improving the provision of smoking cessation support by Dutch primary care providers to their patients. We excluded studies published before 2000 and those without a behavioural support intervention for primary care providers targeting smoking cessation in their patients...

The Smartphone Impact Scale (SIS) was originally developed in English to determine the cognitive, affective, social, and behavioral impacts of smartphones. This study aimed to translate and cross-culturally adapt the SIS instrument into Turkish and investigate its psychometric properties. Two hundred and sixty-four young and middle-aged adults (186 females) with a mean age of 36.24 years (SD = 14.93; range, 18-65 years) were included. For cross-cultural adaptation, two bi-lingual translators used the back-translation procedure...

We normalized, harmonized, and pooled 344,429 surveys collected from 106,470 research participants from 25 research studies that assessed past 30-day alcohol use, drunkenness, smoking cigarettes, using marijuana, and a host of psychosocial variables. After normalizing and harmonizing psychosocial measures, we completed analyses to examine the ability of psychosocial variables to serve as proxy indicators of use. Intentionality, peer descriptive normative beliefs, and age emerged as being of primary importance in indicating use...

This paper evaluated the evidence supporting the factor structure of extant coping instruments based on modern psychometric standards. Our literature search identified nine coping instruments that are routinely used to measure coping strategies in adult populations. While nearly 10 thousand papers have been published using these instruments, only 39 studies have investigated their psychometric validity. Our findings revealed that the majority of these studies did not follow current psychometric recommendations for establishing internal validity in part because they did not account for the ordinal nature of the data...

The Patient Activation Measure (PAM) is a 13-item questionnaire that assesses patients' knowledge, skills, and confidence in self-management. The current study aimed to translate the American version of the PAM-13 into Persian and test the psychometric properties of the Persian version among chronic patients. This cross-sectional study was conducted on 438 chronically ill patients in Rafsanjan, Iran from May to November 2019. The American version of the PAM-13 was translated into Persian using a standardized forward-backward translation method...

Evidence-based program registries (EBPRs) are web-based compilations of behavioral healthcare programs/interventions that rely on research-based criteria to rate program efficacy or effectiveness for support of programmatic decision-making. The objective was to determine the extent to which behavioral health decision-makers access EBPRs and to understand whether and exactly how they use the information obtained from EPBRs. Single State Authorities (SSAs) and service provider agencies in the areas of behavioral health and child welfare were recruited nationally...

Intensive care unit (ICU) nurses are expected to facilitate effective day-to-day communication with patients and family members at the bedside. To date, communication training for ICU health care professionals has targeted mainly intensivists-in-training, but there is limited data on communication experience and needs to be evaluated among ICU nurses. This qualitative study used focus group interviews to explore daily communication experiences with patients' families and communication training needs and preferences among ICU nurses in South Korea...

Mediation analysis is widely adopted by researchers to disentangle the causal pathways by which an intervention affects an outcome. This paper describes a model to estimate the direct and indirect effect from a single subject AB-design with repeated assessments of both the mediator and the outcome. We discuss the plausibility of the modeling assumptions and contrast different approaches to deal with the autocorrelation in the time series data. While there are only small differences between those approaches when the number of time points is small (T = 15), the Generalized Least Squares approach performs best in medium (T = 30) to large (T = 90) time series...

In this article, we present single-case causal mediation analysis as the application of causal mediation analysis to data collected within a single-case experiment. This method combines the focus on the individual with the focus on mechanisms of change, rendering it a promising approach for both mediation and single-case researchers. For this purpose, we propose a new method based on time-discrete state-space modeling to estimate the direct and indirect treatment effects. We demonstrate how to estimate the model for a single-case experiment on stress and craving in a routine alcohol consumer before and after an imposed period of abstinence...

Single-Case Experimental Designs (SCEDs) are increasingly recognized as a valuable alternative to group designs. Mediation analysis is useful in SCEDs contexts because it informs researchers about the underlying mechanism through which an intervention influences the outcome. However, methods for conducting mediation analysis in SCEDs have only recently been proposed. Furthermore, repeated measures of a target behavior present the challenges of autocorrelation and missing data. This paper aims to extend methods for estimating indirect effects in piecewise regression analysis in SCEDs by (1) evaluating three methods for modeling autocorrelation, namely, Newey-West (NW) estimation, feasible generalized least squares (FGLS) estimation, and explicit modeling of an autoregressive structure of order one (AR(1)) in the error terms and (2) evaluating multiple imputation in the presence of data that are missing completely at random...