LEIYUSHI DRPH, MBA BARBARA STARFIELD, MD, MPH JIAHONG XU, MPH, MS Baltimore, Maryland, and Columbia, South Carolina Submitted, revised, October 2, 2000. From the Department of Health Policy and Management, Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and Hygiene, Baltimore (L.S., B.S.) and the Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology, University of South Carolina, Columbia (J.X.) Request for reprints should be addressed to Leiyu Shi, DrPH, MBA, Department of Health Policy and Management, Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and Hygiene, 624 North Broadway, Room 409, Baltimore, MD 21205-1996. E-mail: lshi@jhsph.edu.
Equal item-scale correlationrefers to items in a scale that contribute approximately the same proportion of information about the underlying concept.
Score reliabilityrefers to scores of scales that are reproducible and reliable.
Skewnessrefers to distribution of observations that is not symmetric, ie, when more observations are found at one end of the distribution than the other.
Kurtosisrefers to the extent observations cluster around a central point more than in normal distribution.