This slim volume for students and practitioners in psychiatry introduces scales for measuring desired clinical effects and unwanted side effects of psychiatric drugs, and for measuring patient-reported quality of life. Focus is on two psychometric methods: classical factor analysis and item-response models. No mathematics or statistics background is required. The book begins with an overview of the ideas of six major pioneers in classical psychometrics, then reviews modern psychiatric classification systems used in the US and Europe (DSM-IV, and ICD-10), and overviews the ideas of major thinkers in modern psychometrics. Three chapters are devoted to the clinical consequences of IRT analysis. There is also a chapter on questionnaires. The book includes a glossary and 75 pages of example scales. It was first published in Danish in 2011 by Munksgaard Danmark. Bech is chief psychiatrist at The Mental Health Center North Zealand in Denmark. Annotation ©2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
Clinical Psychometrics is an introduction to the long-term attempt to measure the psychiatric dimension of dementia, schizophrenia, mania, depression, anxiety, neuroticism, extraversion/introversion and health-related quality of life.
The two psychometric procedures, classical factor analysis and modern item-response models, are presented for readers without any requirement for particular mathematical or statistical knowledge. The book is unique in this attempt and provides helpful background information for the dimensional approach that is being used in the forthcoming updates to the diagnostic classification systems, ICD-11 and DSM-5.
The book is written for everyone who is interested in the origins and development of modern psychiatry, and who wants to be familiar with its practical possibilities; how it is possible to compare different individuals with each other, how one may determine the boundary between what is normal and what is disease, or how one may assess the clinical effect of the various forms of treatment, available to present day psychiatry.
