WEEK #6(b) - research methods

Question 1

what is measuring constructs ?

Answer 1

to be able to measure a construct you need to develop a valid and reliable tool to approximate the construct

Question 2

what is the operational definition of CISG 2023 ?

Answer 2

Consensus statement on concussion in sport

Question 3

what are the steps of measuring constructs ?

Answer 3

• identify clinical domains
• develop items to test clinical domains
• pilot items
• analyze data
• revise and validate

Question 4

what are the clinical domains of measuring constructs ?

Answer 4

• affective/emotional function
• cognitive function
• physical/somatic symptoms
• sleep

Question 5

determining the number of factors to retain :

Answer 5

• Retain all factors that have an eigenvalue of 1 or more
• “under the theory that such factors account for more variance in the observed data than do any single variables, which have variances of 1 when transformed to the standard normal distribution.”
• Using this method – 1 factor)
• Parallel Analysis
  – Parallel analysis suggests that the number of factors = 4 and the number of components = 2
  – A factor is retained if the eigenvalue from the observed data is larger than the 95th percentile of the distribution of null factor eigenvalues generated from the synthetic data.
• Items With Strong Loadings on Multiple Factors
  – Ideally, the researcher would like an item to load significantly on a single factor.
  – it is quite common for items to load significantly on multiple factors (e.g., loadings > .30), especially with an oblique rotation
  – There is some disagreement in the factor analysis literature as to what to do about the multiple-loading problem. Kline
• This would provide the simple structure solution (Thurstone, 1947) that assumes that the factors are correlated. (2000a) suggests eliminating high multiple-loading items because of the difficulty in interpreting the meaning of the resulting scales. Hair and colleagues (1995) agree that the presence of items with moderate-sized loadings on multiple factors makes interpretation of the factors more difficult, but they are less inclined to drop the offending item(s). They argue that the meaning of an item must be taken into account when assigning labels to each of the factors on which the item loads. An additional challenge is to decide on which factor to ultimately place that item.

Question 6

what is the conclusion with SCAT5 ?

Answer 6

while the SCAT5 does measure multiple clinical domains, the took when used properly only measures concussion, not the clinical domains separately