What Clinicians Need to Know About Measurement

The August issue of JAMDA features numerous articles that advance measurement in post-acute and long-term care. Measurement is of critical importance in clinical care: it matters for screening, assessing, predicting, treating, dosing, and monitoring. However, few clinicians understand critical issues underlying measurement itself, despite the fact that such understanding is important to digest research findings and conclusions and their application to practice. This editorial presents 5 of those issues: measurement in relation to causality, relevance, adequacy, psychometrics, and inference.