Assessment of patients’ tendency to give a positive or negative rating to healthcare

BACKGROUND: Adjustment of patient satisfaction scores for case-mix variables such as age and sex may lead to overadjustment. The patient's tendency to rate healthcare positively or negatively may be the only variable that should be adjusted to improve the comparability of satisfaction scores between healthcare providers. OBJECTIVE: To develop a measure of "rating tendency", assess its stability over time, explore its distribution across …