Reliability and feasibility of measuring medical interviewing skills: the revised Maastricht History-Taking and Advice Checklist.
Medical interviewing skills are integral to good medical care. In order to measure these skills an instrument has been developed, called the Maastricht History-Taking and Advice Checklist (MAAS). It has been studied with regard to interrater reliability and validity. In this study a revised version of the MAAS (MAAS-R), a check-list of concrete interview behaviour, has been investigated concerning feasibility and reliability for examination purposes. Audio-recordings were obtained of 24 doctors, each interviewing eight different standardized patients. The recordings were independently scored by three general practitioners trained in using the MAAS-R. The results of generalizability analysis, considering the influences of doctors, cases and raters, are encouraging. In order to overcome case-specificity feasible and reliable measurement can be accomplished with 8-10 cases in 2-21/2 hours of testing time, each case being scored by a different rater. Reliability improves considerably if assessment is restricted to basic interviewing skills.
van Thiel
J
J
Department of General Practice, University of Limburg, Maastricht, The Netherlands.
Kraan
H F
HF
Van Der Vleuten
C P
CP
D002983:Clinical Competence; D004521:Educational Measurement / Q000379:methods; D006801:Humans; D007407:Interviews as Topic / Q000592:standards*; D008487:Medical History Taking; D009426:Netherlands; D015203:Reproducibility of Results