This book presents a general and comprehensive framework for the assurance of quality in measurements. Written by a foremost expert in the field, the text reflects an on-going international effort to extend traditional quality assured measurement, rooted in fundamental physics and the SI, to include non-physical areas such as person-centred care and the social sciences more generally. Chapter by chapter, the book follows the measurement quality assurance loop, based on Deming’s work. The author enhances this quality assurance cycle with insights from recent research, including work on the politics and philosophy of metrology, the new SI, quantitative and qualitative scales and entropy, decision risks and uncertainty when addressing human challenges, Man as a Measurement Instrument, and Psychometry and Person-centred care. Quality Assured Measurement: Unification across Social and Physical Sciences provides students and researchers in physics, chemistry, engineering, medicine and the social sciences with practical guidance on designing, implementing and applying a quality-assured measurement while engaging readers in the most novel and expansive areas of contemporary measurement research.

A Practical Tool for Learning New Methods Quality assurance and measurement uncertainty in analytical laboratories has become increasingly important. To meet increased scrutiny and keep up with new methods, practitioners very often have to rely on self-study. A practical textbook for students and a self-study tool for analytical laboratory employees, Quality Assurance and Quality Control in the Analytical Chemical Laboratory: A Practical Approach defines the tools used in QA/QC, especially the application of statistical tools during analytical data treatment. Unified Coverage of QA in Analytical Chemistry Clearly written and logically organized, this book delineates the concepts of practical QA/QC, taking a generic approach that can be applied to any field of analysis. Using an approach grounded in hands-on experience, the book begins with the theory behind quality control systems and then moves on to discuss examples of tools such as validation parameter measurements, the use of statistical tests, counting the margin of error, and estimating uncertainty. The authors draw on their experience in uncertainty estimation, traceability, reference materials, statistics, proficiency tests, and method validation to provide practical guidance on each step of the process. Extended Coverage of QC/QA in Analytical and Testing Laboratories Presenting guidance on all aspects of QA and measurement results, the book covers QC/QA in a more complex and extended manner than other books on this topic. This range of coverage supplies an integrated view on measures like the use of reference materials and method validation. With worked-out examples and Excel spreadsheets that users can use to try the concepts themselves, the book provides not only know-what but know-how.

This unique collection of chapters from world experts on person-centered outcome (PCO) measures addresses the following critical questions: Can individual experiences be represented in measurements that do not reduce unique differences to meaningless uniformity? How person-centric are PCO measures? Are PCO measurements capable of delivering the kind of quality assured quantification required for high-stakes decision making? Are PCO measures likely to support improved health care delivery? Have pivotal clinical studies failed to deliver treatments for diseases because of shortcomings in the PCO measures used? Are these shortcomings primarily matters of precision and meaningfulness? Or is the lack of common languages for communicating outcomes also debilitating to quality improvement, research, and the health care economy? Three key issues form an urgent basis for further investigation. First, the numbers generated by PCO measures are increasingly used as the central dependent variables upon which high stakes decisions are made. The rising profile of PCO measures places new demands for higher quality information from scale and test construction, evaluation, selection, and interpretation. Second, PCO measurement science has well-established lessons to be learned from those who have built and established the science over many decades. Finally, the goal in making a PCO measurement is to inform outcome management. As such, it is vitally important that key stakeholders understand that, over the last half century, developments in psychometrics have refocused measurement on illuminating clinically important individual differences in the context of widely reproduced patterns of variation in health and functioning, comparable scale values for quality improvement, and practical explanatory models. This book’s audience includes anyone interested in person-centered care, including healthcare researchers and practitioners, policy makers, pharmaceutical industry representatives, clinicians, patient advocates, and metrologists. This is an open access book.

The book focuses on the extension of quality-assured measurement and metrology into psychological and social domains. This is not only feasible and achievable, but also a pressing concern. Significant progress in developing a common conceptual system for measurement across the sciences has been made in recent collaborations between metrologists and psychometricians, as reported in the chapters of this book. Modeling, estimation, and interpretation of objectively reproducible unit quantities that support both general comparability and adaptation to unique local circumstances are demonstrated in fields as diverse as artificial intelligence, justice, and beauty perception.