Dalhousie dyspnea scales: construct and content validity of pictorial scales for measuring dyspnea
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Because there are no child-friendly, validated, self-report measures of dyspnea or breathlessness, we developed, and provided initial validation, of three, 7-item, pictorial scales depicting three sub-constructs of dyspnea: throat closing, chest tightness, and effort. METHODS: We developed the three scales (Throat closing, Chest tightness, and Effort) using focus groups with 25 children. Subsequently, seventy-nine children (29 children with asthma, 30 children with cystic fibrosis. and 20 children who were healthy) aged 6 to 18 years rated each picture in each series, using a 0-10 scale. In addition, each child placed each picture in each series on a 100-cm long Visual Analogue Scale, with the anchors "not at all" and "a lot". RESULTS: Children aged eight years or older rated the scales in the correct order 75% to 98% correctly, but children less than 8 years of age performed unreliably. The mean distance between each consecutive item in each pictorial scale was equal. CONCLUSION: Preliminary results revealed that children aged 8 to 18 years understood and used these three scales measuring throat closing, chest tightness, and effort appropriately. The scales appear to accurately measure the construct of breathlessness, at least at an interval level. Additional research applying these scales to clinical situations is warranted.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".