BACKGROUND The primary purpose was to assess if VAS or Likert was relatively more suitable when assessing self-ratings of voice and speech in patients treated for laryngeal cancer. An additional purpose was to investigate whether the scales differed in measuring change after treatment. MATERIAL/METHODS Using both VAS and Likert, 71 patients answered three questions at baseline and 12 months a...

PURPOSE assessing patient satisfaction after endoscopy with a standardized survey is recommended by gastrointestinal professional societies. The purpose of this study was to assess both patient satisfaction with colonoscopy performed by family physicians and physicians' technical competence in colonoscopy. METHODS modified Group Health Association of America 9 surveys were sent to all 230 pat...

The Thurstonian item response theory (IRT) model allows estimating the latent trait scores of respondents directly through their responses in forced-choice questionnaires. It solves a part of problems brought by the traditional scoring methods of this kind of questionnaires. However, the forced-choice designs may still have their own limitations: The model may encounter underidentification and ...

Surveys are an important tool for researchers. Survey attributes are typically discrete data measured on a Likert scale. Collected responses from the survey contain an enormous amount of data. It is increasingly important to develop powerful means for clustering such data and knowledge extraction that could help in decision-making. The process of clustering becomes complex if the number of surv...