Abstract:
There is no general agreement in the field regarding a reliable and valid objective measure of community participation after TBI. This study will use a multi-center, prospective, cohort design to evaluate participation items pooled from four currently used tools: the Craig Handicap Assessment and Reporting Technique Short Form (CHART-SF); the Community Integration Questionnaire Version 2 (CIQ-2); the Participation Objective-Participation Subjective (PO-PS) section of the Living Life After TBI (LLATBI); and the Mayo-Portland Participation Index (M2PI). The primary objectives of this study are to: 1) evaluate internal consistency, concurrent validity, and item/scale structure of current measures of community participation after TBI; and 2) based on these analyses identify the most psychometrically sound objective measure of participation. The anticipated outcome of this project will be a new measure of participation (after TBI), based on the best components of existing measures.