Valid and Convenient Questionnaire Assessment of Chinese Body Constitution: Item Characteristics, Reliability, and Construct Validation

作者：Taoying Lu, Jingwen Yan, Jianfang Chang, Jianxiong Cai, Lingjia Yin, Jiamin Yuan, Li Huang, Yingshuai Li, Minghua Bai, Kit‐Tai Hau, Darong Wu, Zhimin Yang · 发表于：Patient Preference and Adherence · 年份：2022 · DOI：10.2147/ppa.s373512 · 被引用次数：19 · 研究领域：Traditional Chinese Medicine Studies、Body Composition Measurement Techniques、Biofield Effects and Biophysics

Background: Body constitution is a fundamental concept in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) for clinical diagnosis, treatment of illness, and community-based health promotion. Clinical assessment of patients' body constitutions, however, has never been easy and consistent, even by well-trained clinicians and TCM practitioners. Therefore, questionnaires such as the popular Constitution in Chinese Medicine Questionnaire (CCMQ) can be an appealing and convenient assessment alternative. The present research borrowed advanced methodologies for questionnaire development in psychology and other social sciences to examine the performance of the CCMQ in terms of (i) the strength of relations of each item with its designated constitution, (ii) the reliabilities of each constitution, and (iii) the overall 9-constitution structure. This research provided empirical evidence to support the use of the CCMQ and proposed directions for refinement in future revisions of the CCMQ or similar measures. Methods: A total of 1571 volunteers from three villages in southern China participated in the CCMQ survey. The item characteristics, reliabilities, interconstitution correlations, and confirmatory factor analysis of the 9-body-constitution structure were examined. Results: The results generally supported the appropriateness of the clinical observations (the questionnaire items) and the CCMQ 9-constitution classification structure. Nevertheless, some relatively weaker items, item pairs with similar...