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National Information Center on Health Services Research and Health Care Technology (NICHSR)

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Introduction to Health Services Research : A Self-Study Course

Module 4: Search the Literature of HSR: Databases (Page 20 of 29)
Section 1: Health Services Research Databases and Information Resources

HaPI - Health and Psychosocial Instruments

Health and Psychosocial Instruments "features material on unpublished information-gathering tools for clinicians that are discussed in journal articles, such as questionnaires, interview schedules, tests, checklists, rating and other scales, coding schemes, and projective techniques. Over 2/3 of the tools are in medical and nursing areas such pain measurement, quality of life assessment, and drug efficacy evaluation."

One of the questions librarians get asked frequently by students and faculty is where they can find instruments and survey questions - especially surrounding quality of life and pain measurement. HaPI can help locate this type of information quickly.

More on HaPI

  • Producer: Behavioral Measurement Database Services (BMDS)
  • Vendor:
  • Topics: Contains descriptions of information on instruments of use in assessing the health and behavior of infants, children, adolescents, adults, and the elderly. Topics covered include public health, communication, psychology, nursing, organizational behavior, medicine, sociology, physical education, psychiatry, human resources, gerontology, and dental medicine. Covers questionnaires, interview schedules, observation checklists and manuals, index measures, coding schemes, scenarios and vignettes, rating scales, projective techniques, and tests. Includes title, author, publication resource, development date, publication date, subjects, description, and reliability and validity information. HaPI producers, as contractors of NLM, are working to identify current records and index new instruments that have HSR applications, and create a full-text record format of the instruments, wherever possible.
  • Search by topic, instrument name, by instrument acronym and by author
  • HaPI uses official subject headings from (MeSH - Medical Subject Headings) and the Thesaurus of Psychological Terms.
  • HAPI indexes instruments using the full title of the instrument. At the Enter Keyword or phrase prompt type the name of the instrument to retrieve a named instrument.

Exercise

  1. If you have access to the HaPI database, search for "activities of daily living" or "pain measurement" or "sickness impact profile". How many hits do you get? Can you tell who produced the scale and how to contact them for additional information? What information would you want from the producer? Select one or more records and examine it/them thoroughly. What useful information about the instrument can you retrieve? Why is it valuable to have access to instruments?

Discussion Questions

  1. Other resources for getting health surveys are available for your use. These include the Buros Institute of Mental Measurements and the Tests and Measures in the Social Sciences [Web Archives] compiled by Helen Hough, Health Sciences Librarian, University of Texas at Arlington. Visit the sites and describe the value of each of these sites to your work in health services. Also, describe what you find at each site.
  2. Why is it important to remind clients that questions taken from someone else's survey may not have the same reliability and validity in your survey as it did in the original survey?
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