Considerations for appraising diagnostic studies of communication disorders

Abstract

Clinicians have always been aware of the importance of using valid and reliable clinical tests and measures-and of avoiding those that are not. However, the choice of which tests and measures to use is often more a matter of personal preference, arising out of knowledge of a test's psychometric properties and one's experience with the test, rather than being based on a systematic, critical appraisal of assessment tools. This paper proposes a method of critically appraising clinical assessments in the speech and language sciences, for the purpose of deciding whether they are likely to be informative in diagnosing individuals with communication disorders. QUADAS (Quality Assessment of Diagnostic Accuracy Studies)-a 14-item, evidence-based critical appraisal tool (Whiting, Rutjes, Reitsma, Bossuyt, & Kleijnen, 2003) originally designed to assess the quality of diagnostic-accuracy studies used in systematic reviews in medicine-is presented, with an example of how it can be applied in the field of communication disorders.