[Use and application of psychophysical methods in nursing research]

Concepts and subjective phenomena such as social attitudes, opinions, and judgment processes have always been difficult to measure accurately. Many concepts or variables in nursing are of a subjective nature. As with the social sciences, the nursing profession has faced many problems in attempting to obtain precise measurements of such variables. The psychophysical methodology, specially the magnitude estimation and cross-modality matching procedures, developed in sensory psychophysics and currently being used in the social sciences, shows promise for providing nursing with an instrument of precisely scaling subjective phenomena. The purpose of this paper is to describe these measurement techniques, the theoretical paradigm on which it is based, and several social, clinical and nursing studies that have utilized these sensitive measurement strategies.