Faculty abstracts

Background. The Aging Males' Symptoms scale (AMS) is an internationally used scale to analyse health related quality of life (HRQoL). The aim of this paper is to provide evidence that the Nigerian AMS scale measures HRQoL with similar accuracy as in other language versions. We also intended to show the severity of complaints of aging in males in advanced old age. More generally, we aim to demonstrate that the Nigerian AMS scale is an applicable, validated, sensitive instrument to measure HRQoL in Nigeria.

Material. We performed a representative survey in Nigeria to get data of the AMS scale in a group of males in old age. The survey was a household-based population sample conducted in March 2006. The Nigerian data were compared with existing data from other European countries. Only community-based data were used for this comparison.

Results and discussion. The internal structure of the AMS (factorial analysis) was sufficiently similar with the comparison group of other countries in Europe to conclude that the scale really measures the same phenomenon. The sub-scores and total score correlations were high (0.8–0.9) but lower among the sub-scales (0.4–0.8). This suggests that the domains are not fully independent. The reliability (consistency) was found to be good and almost identical with European countries.

Mean scores of the Nigerian AMS did systematically differ from data of other European studies. There were much higher because of older age. The same applies for the population reference values obtained in Nigeria. It is the first time that population norm values are available for very old age.

Conclusion. The Nigerian AMS scale is a standardized HRQoL scale that showed good psychometric characteristics (reliability, validity) similar to other international versions. We suggest that the results obtained with the Nigerian AMS scale should be used preliminarily as reference for ‘norm values’ for highest age, i.e. in absence of other data. Confirmation in future studies is needed.     

Identifying predictors of violent behaviour among students using the conventional logistic and multilevel logistic models

Analysing individual-, school- and class-level observations is a good and efficient approach in epidemiologic research. Using data on violent behaviour among secondary school students we compared results from the conventional logistic modelling with multilevel logistic modelling approach using the gllamm command in Stata. We illustrated the advantage of multilevel modelling over the conventional logistic modelling through an example of data from violence experience among secondary school students. We constructed a logistic model with a random intercept on the school and class levels to account for unexplained heterogeneity between schools and classes. In the multilevel model, we estimated that, in an average school, the odds of experiencing violence are 3 (OR=2.99, 95% CI: 1.86, 4.81, p<0.0001) times higher for students who use drugs as opposed to the odds of experiencing violence for students who do not use drugs. However, the estimates in the conventional logistic model are slightly lower.

We estimated that a normally distributed random intercept for schools and classes that accounts for any unexplained heterogeneity between schools and classes has variances 0.017 and 0.035, respectively. We therefore recommend the multilevel logistic modelling when data are clustered.     

Intimate partner violence and the spatial pattern of maternal healthcare services utilization among parous married women in northern Nigeria

Journal of Population Research - The low uptake of maternal healthcare services (MHS) in Nigeria is implicated in the country’s poor maternal health outcomes. In northern Nigeria where these...