Research
Postdoctoral Project
Measuring a Patient: Psychometric and Clinimetric Validation Practices and the Emergence of Idiographic Indexes, 1970s-2000s
“Measuring a Patient” historically and methodologically contextualizes the emergence of individualized health assessment instruments, such as the Patient Generated Index (PGI) and the Schedule for Evaluation of Individualized Quality of Life (SEIQoL). Using historical methods, I examine the ways in which individualized measuring practices challenge dominant theoretical views of measurement held by philosophers and scientists. The scope of historical research includes (1) examining published arguments and debates between psychometric and clinimetric measuring perspectives during the 1970s-2000s, as well as (2) tracing the adoption of subject-oriented modelling techniques and instrument design from Social Judgement Theory to be used for patients’ own assessments of themselves, and (3) the emergence of the “nomothetic” (general, law-like phenomena) and “idiographic” (individual phenomena) distinction within behavioral assessment methodology and its impacts on clinical measurement practices and discourse.
Dissertation
Measuring “Well”: Clinical Measuring Practices and Philosophy of Measurement
This dissertation examines four successful, patient-centric measuring practices in the Anglo-American clinical context, spanning from the early 19th century to today: (1) the use of “drops” as a fluid unit in medicine and pharmacy (2) the measurement of cervical dilation by hand (digital cervimetry) for labor assessment (3) the APGAR score for newborn health assessment, and (4) the current development of the Patient Generated Index for measuring patient status and outcomes. All four practices were developed to ensure preferable patient outcomes, at the expense of precisely representing empirical states. I discuss the ethical and epistemic challenges past practitioners had to overcome when validating these measures, how they went about it, and consider how their endeavors can inform methodological issues faced in the formation of clinical indexes today. The ethical-epistemic challenge of having both “patient-centric” and “evidence-based” measurement has a much longer history than the recent emergence of such terms suggests.
Public Lectures
Feeling Centimeters of Dilation: Why You’ve Never Heard of a Cervimeter
Lunchtime Lecture, Science History Institute, Philadelphia, PA, USA Rebecca Jackson, 21 March 2023.
Clinimetrics or Clinical Psychometrics? Reexamining Disciplinary Boundaries and Measuring Methodologies
FoUU X-Talks, Region Uppsala, Sweden Rebecca Jackson and Mikael Andersén, 29 April 2024.
The “Uncertain Method of Drops”: How a Non-Uniform Unit Survived the Century of Standardization
SISS Meets Early Careers, Italian Society for the History of Science (SISS) Armel Cornu and Rebecca Jackson, 2 April 2024.