Design and Assessment of Outcomes in Mental Health Research

• Activity Number: 49
• Type: Invited
• Date/Time: Sunday, July 29, 2012 : 4:00 PM to 5:50 PM
• Sponsor: Statistics in Mental Health Research
• Author(s): Amita Manatunga*+ and Limin Peng and Ying Guo
• Companies: Emory University and Emory University and Emory University
• Keywords: agreement ; screening

Abstract

A fundamental objective in biomedical research is to establish valid measurements of the clinical disease of interest. Measures of agreement have been widely used for validating a new instrument by assessing similarity of measurements with an established instrument. Although the foundation of agreement methodology has been mostly laid out, many important statistical issues have not yet been resolved. In this presentation, I will present our recent work on how to extend the classical framework of agreement to evaluate the capability of interpreting a continuous measurement in an ordinal scale. We propose a new concept, called "broad sense agreement", which characterizes the correspondence between a continuous scale and an ordinal scale. We present a natural measure for broad sense agreement. Nonparametric estimation and inference procedures are developed for the proposed measure along with theoretical justifications. We also discuss issues related to the design of the experiments and how new instruments can be developed using such a measure for disease screening in community studies.