Principles and Practice of Clinimetrics in Epilepsy

Abstract

The world of clinical medicine offers two different kinds of challenges in measurement. The first kind of challenge, which might be called mensuration, consists of converting the observed phenomena to the basic raw data. Mensuration is what we do when we develop some kind of mechanism and rating scale to express height for individual people in inches or centimetres, to express gender in categories such as male or female, or to express angina pectoris in categories such as none, mild, moderate, severe. Quantification is what we do when we take the basic expressions of data for individual people and then form groups of people and expressions that summarize the collected data in each group. Thus, we might form a group of men and express the height of those men in a summary called the mean. We might form a group of women and express the proportion of women who have angina itself or the proportion of women who have severe angina. This kind of proportionate occurrence is often called prevalence.