Publications by authors named "D F Polit"
Clinical significance in nursing research: A discussion and descriptive analysis.
Int J Nurs Stud
August 2017
Background: It is widely understood that statistical significance should not be equated with clinical significance, but the topic of clinical significance has not received much attention in the nursing literature. By contrast, interest in conceptualizing and operationalizing clinical significance has been a "hot topic" in other health care fields for several decades.
Objectives: The major purpose of this paper is to briefly describe recent advances in defining and quantifying clinical significance.
Background: Psychometric concepts have undergone a transformation in health fields, as articulated in a consensus report by an international panel of health measurement experts: COSMIN, the COnsensus-based Standards for the selection of health Measurement INstruments.
Objectives: The aims of this paper are to describe emerging ideas relating to the development and testing of new measures in health fields, to present a revised measurement taxonomy that builds upon COSMIN, and to explore the extent to which the new measurement concepts have played a role in psychometric assessments in nursing.
Design: A descriptive analysis of a sample of psychometric papers published in three major nursing journals was undertaken.
Objective: to test the effect of a 16-week multimodal exercise program on neurocognitive and physical functioning and brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF).
Design: a single-blinded, parallel-group randomised controlled trial.
Settings: university campus and community-based halls.
Purpose: To focus attention on the need for rigorous and carefully designed test-retest reliability assessments for new patient-reported outcomes and to encourage retest researchers to be thoughtful, ambitious, and creative in their retest efforts.
Methods: The paper outlines key challenges that confront retest researchers, calls attention to some limitations in meeting those challenges, and describes some strategies to improve retest research.
Results: Modest retest coefficients are often reported as acceptable, and many important decisions-such as the retest interval-appear not to be evidence-based.