To do this, students needed to have the ability to focus on the relevant items of the topic and express these orally to their fellow students.
Based on the symptoms 13 – 20, a group of experts (oncologist, internist, gastroenterologist, somnologist, general practitioner and statistician) formulated twelve items on the topics of meaningfulness, manageability and resilience in dealing with cancer disease and formation of perspective.
"Based on field tests, the general population of current California students did not do well in items on those topics," said Robert Anderson, the California official overseeing the exit exams.
Question items on these topics feature prominently in short forms of existing disease-specific QoL questionnaires and/or in the generic instruments that have been applied to IBD.
For a more in-depth news item on this topic, stay tuned for the 15 December issue of Science.
These scores are the product of the proportion respondents (0-1) reportinegativeivexperienceses ('never/sometimes' or 'no') and the average importance ratings (1-4) on all items underlying the topic.
The analysis was ongoing, implying that HMB and MNW repeatedly checked and rephrased specific items in the topic list based on previous interviews.
We then rephrased some of the questions and put different emphasis on some of the items in the topic list: although we asked respondents about all treatment decisions that had been made, we focused more on the decision when further treatment was withheld.
It is a structured, anonymous and repeated process requiring experts to respond to non-leading, unambiguous statements on items pertinent to the topic [ 25].
While the endeavour was to focus on individual items related to the topic of T2T, the Expert Committee felt so convinced on the principal nature and truthfulness of this statement that 91.8% of the experts accepted it.
