ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors provide a brief, historical overview of dyspnea measurement and discuss various ways of evaluating and classifying dyspnea-related questionnaires and rating scales. They summarize efforts to bring some order to the field of dyspnea measurement through a proposed domain framework, which attempts to categorize dyspnea measures in a manner congruent with the conceptual definition of dyspnea. To illustrate the application of this framework to real-world measurement issues, the authors provide two case studies: one clinical and one laboratory. They deal with some thoughts on future directions in dyspnea measurement. Classical test theory (CTT) is the formal basis for much traditional psychometric assessment including the development of many dyspnea measures. Under assumptions of CTT, reliability and validity are properties of scores in a given context of use. In contrast to conventional psychometric testing of instruments under CTT, a more modern approach is based on item-response theory and associated analytical methods.
