BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE The modified Rankin Scale is widely used to assess changes in activity and lifestyle after stroke, but it has been criticized for its subjectivity. The purpose of the present study was to compare conventional assessment on the modified Rankin Scale with assessment through a structured interview. METHODS Sixty-three patients with stroke 6 to 24 months previously were int...

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder-Fifth Edition explicitly requires that attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptoms should be apparent across settings, taking into account reports from multiple informants. Yet, it provides no guidelines how information from different raters should be combined in ADHD diagnosis. We examined the validity of different approache...

BACKGROUND/AIMS CIBIC plus-J is the Japanese language version equivalent to CIBIC plus. Variability of CIBIC plus-J arises among raters in accordance with their experience and their memories of patients' conditions at baseline. Therefore, in a multicenter trial of Alzheimer's disease, CIBIC plus-J interviews with Alzheimer's disease patients were videotaped, and the tapes were assessed by centr...

Single and multiple ratings of test items have become a stock component of standardized educational tests and surveys. For both formative and summative evaluation of raters, a number of multiple-read rating designs are now commonplace (Wilson and Hoskens, 1999), including designs with as many as six raters per item (e.g. Sykes, Heidorn and Lee, 1999). As digital image based distributed rating b...

BACKGROUND Inter-rater agreement in the interpretation of chest X-ray (CXR) films is crucial for clinical and epidemiological studies of tuberculosis. We compared the readings of CXR films used for a survey of tuberculosis between raters from two Asian countries. METHODS Of the 11,624 people enrolled in a prevalence survey in Hanoi, Viet Nam, in 2003, we studied 258 individuals whose CXR film...

Writing assessments often make use of analytic rating scales to describe the criteria for different performance levels. However, the use of such rating scales requires a level of interpretation by raters and if several raters are involved, the reliability of examinee scores can be significantly affected (Engelhard, 1992; McNamara 1996). Variability between raters is partly managed by rater trai...

BACKGROUND Patients with schizophrenia have deficits in facial affect expression and detection that hinder social interactions. The goal of this study was to examine whether or not epidemiologically-related antipsychotic-naïve schizotypal personality disorder (SPD) subjects would have similar deficits as patients with schizophrenia. METHODS Matched SPD and healthy comparison (HC) subjects wer...

Acoustic signals function in intrasexual mating competition a wide variety of species, including humans. The low voice pitch human males has been proposed to represent an honest signal formidability. Although men affects perceptions size and dominance, it is relatively weakly associated with objective measures formidability such as body strength. As result, some authors have argued that male no...