Abstract

BECKER, Piet J.; WOLVAARDT, Jacobus (Kobus) S.; HENNESSY, Angie  and  MAREE, Carin. A composite score for a measuring instrument utilising re-scaled Likert values and item weigths from matrices of pairwise ratios . Health SA Gesondheid (Online) [online]. 2009, vol.14, n.1, pp.29-32. ISSN 2071-9736.

A methodology is proposed to develop a measuring instrument (metric) for evaluating subjects from a population that cannot provide data to facilitate the development of such a metric (e.g. pre-term infants in the neonatal intensive care unit). Central to this methodology is the employment of an expert group that decides on the items to be included in the metric, the weights assigned to these items, and an index associated with the Likert scale points for each item. The experts supply pairwise ratios of an importance between items, and the geometric mean method is applied to these to establish the item weights - a well-established procedure in multi-criteria decision analysis. The ratios are found by having a managed discussion before asking the members of the expert panel to mark a visual analogue scale for each item.

Keywords : subjective judgement theory; Likert scale; weights; measuring instrument; pairwise comparison.

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