Insight provides a range of consulting and training services for designing, evaluating, conducting, and analyzing health surveys. A special type of survey is a scale.

Surveys play an important role in health research as patients and stakeholders are asked to describe their experiences, knowledge, behaviour and attitude. Considerable skill is required to design surveys that are:

• Valid - the data that is measured is an accurate representation of an underlying concept (construct).

• Reliable - if data is collected on more than one occasion (possibly by a different interviewer, data collection mechanism, or question wording) will the same data be recorded.

• Reproducible - a special type of reliability is test-retest reliability or reproducibility. In this case we are assessing reproducibility when exactly the same data collection procedure is used on more than one occasion.

• Representative - do the participants involved in the survey have the same characteristics as the total population the study is designed for (eg. do we have the same ratio of males to females in our study population as in the total population?)

A number of methodological and statistical techniques are used to design and evaluate proposed survey strategies.

A scale is a particular type of survey. In some situations there is the challenge where we want to measure a more intangible property within a survey (eg. to measure a person’s intelligence instead of their body weight). In this case we might use a scale (to ask a series of questions of a participant, and to combine their responses to create a total score). One example of this is using an IQ Score as a measure of a person’s intelligence. Considerable work is required to assess the accuracy of a proposed scale (such as assessing validity and reliability).

Insight provides a range of consulting and training services for designing, evaluating, conducting, and analyzing health surveys and scales. These include helping design the wording of surveys and scales, using different methods for piloting and trialling proposed surveys and scales, data collection, data preparation, analysis, and reporting.

Insight is based at the Gold Coast Health and Knowledge Precinct. The Precinct contains Griffith University Gold Coast, the Gold Coast University Hospital, the Gold Coast Private Hospital, and the Cohort and Lumina tech parks. Insight provides research, consulting, training, and IT support services for clients across the Precinct and for the broader international community.