title: Quantifying tissue damage from childhood injury: the minor injury severity scale.
abstract: Described an instrument designed to quantify the extent of tissue severity damage following a minor childhood injury event. Few tools exist to allow objective assessment of injury and those which do exist are oriented toward major injuries necessitating medical intervention. The Minor Injury Severity Scale (MISS) does not require specialized medical experience to apply. It yields a 0-7 score which indexes objective parameters such as depth and length of lesion for 22 different kinds of injuries. The data reported here suggest good coder reliability, excellent test-retest stability, and acceptable correspondence between mothers' and children's reports. Data are presented on divergent validity to show that tissue damage is related to but is not the same as injury outcomes such as pain, fear, and disability. Limitations of the scale and challenges to future research are also discussed.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Missouri, Columbia 65211, USA.
authors.forename: L
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Peterson
authors.forename: L
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Saldana
authors.forename: N
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Heiblum
mesh_terms: D002648:Child; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D015588:Observer Variation; D011594:Psychometrics; D011897:Random Allocation; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D015599:Trauma Severity Indices