Research Guides: Public Health Resources: Research Tools

Research Instruments

What are measurement tools in Public Health:

Measurement tools are instruments used by investigators to measure or collect data on a variety of variables. Types of measurement tools include scales, indexes, surveys, interviews, questionnaires, and informal observations.

How do I find them?

Finding measurement tools that are validated and reviewed can be a time-consuming process. If you know the name of the tool you are looking for then you might search the literature to find reviews and validation. If you are looking by subject matter, you can use simple literature searches in PubMed and CINAHL to try and identify scales and measurements that have previously been used.

A search example using Medical Subject Headings and search terms plus a topic:

((inventor*[ti] OR survey*[ti] OR interview*[ti] OR questionnaire*[ti] OR test*[ti] OR measure*[ti] OR scale*[ti] OR batter*[ti] OR checklist*[ti] OR instrument*[ti] OR pretest*[ti] OR post-test*[ti]) AND ("Surveys and Questionnaires"[Mesh] OR "Health Care Surveys"[Mesh] OR "Nutrition Surveys"[Mesh] OR "Health Surveys"[Mesh] OR "Diet Surveys"[Mesh] OR "Dental Health Surveys"[Mesh] OR "Contraceptive Prevalence Surveys"[Mesh] OR "Demography"[Mesh] OR "Cross-Sectional Studies"[Mesh] OR "Longitudinal Studies"[Mesh] OR "Health Status Indicators"[Mesh] OR "Data Collection"[Mesh] OR "Psychological Tests"[Mesh] OR "Personality Tests"[Mesh] OR "Personality Assessment"[Mesh] OR "Psychological Techniques"[Mesh] OR "Psychometrics"[Mesh])) AND family[ti]

Switch out topic (in red) as appropriate.

If you are just beginning your search;

Consider looking for scales and measurements keywords in your Harvard Dataverse Community
Canvas the literature by doing a search in PubMed or CINAHL or look in the resources below
ETS Test Link
Mental measurements yearbook with Tests in Print
Directory of Unpublished Experimental Mental Measures
Health and Psychosocial Instruments (HAPI)

Finding, accessing a full tool and gaining permission may be like a lengthy process. Plan for this ahead of time. It may seem like an efficient option to create your own measurement tool but unique tools take a lok time to validate, there may be the exact tool already in use, and unique tools are often unable to be aggregated with other datasets and analyzed.

For additional options locating research instruments, contact your Public Health Liaison Librarian at Countway Library.

Students at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health can access NVivo through their student VDI Software Inventory page.

NVivo Resources

Guides

Tutorials, Blogs, and Online Instruction

LinkedIn Learning @ Harvard (formerly Lynda.com)
NVivo (via Lumivero) Blog
NVivo YouTube Webinars by Vendor (QSR)
NVivo On-Demand Webinars (QSR)
NVivo Guide - University of Pennsylvania

Working With Groups

Please note that in NVivo you can share files and merge team members' work (see Windows instructions for merging or Mac instructions for merging), but if you would like the ability to code simultaneously you will need to buy one of two alternative NVivo packages: NVivo Collaboration Server (for use with Windows only) or NVivo Collaboration Cloud (for use with Windows or Mac, but not in combination).

NVivo Strategies for Teamwork (Windows)
NVivo Strategies for Teamwork (Mac)
Inter-Rater Reliability with NVivo = Coding Comparison Query in NVivo
- Coding Comparison Query for Windows
- Coding Comparison Query for Mac

Here are some more resources for learning more about qualitative research in teams generally:

Liggett, A.M, Glesne, C.E., Johnston, A.P., Hasazi, S.B., & Schattman, R.A. (1994). 'Teaming in qualitative research: lessons learned'. Qualitative Studies in Education , Vol 7 No. 1
MacQueen, K.M., McLellan, E., Kay, K., Milstein, B. (1999). 'Codebook Development for Team-based Qualitative Analysis'. Cultural Anthropology Methods Vol. 10 No.2
Sprokkereef, A., Lakin, E., Pole, C. J., & Burgess, R. G. (1995). 'The data, the team, and the Ethnograph'. in R. G. Burgess (Ed.), Computing and Qualitative Research (Vol. 5,). Greenwich: Jai Press, Inc.