Insights into an individual's perceptions of their impairment and the personal relevance of work can promote a better understanding of return to work behaviour. Integrating individual perceptions is essential to advancing a multidimensional approach in return to work research.

Objective evaluation of clinical competence is always a difficult task. Many attempts have been made to design an instrument for such evaluation. and Performance Evaluation of Occupational Therapy Students (PEOTS) is such an instrument. It was designed as a criterion-referenced evaluation of performance in four broad areas of clinical competence: professional interaction, assessment, programming and treatment. This instrument has enjoyed fairly broad acceptance based on its face validity alone. The purpose of this study was to collect preliminary data on the content and construct validity of the instrument. A sample of 43 new graduates from Canadian occupational therapy programs were evaluated on the job within the first year of their practice using PEOTS. The data were collected over a two year period and came from facilities across the country. Analysis of the results showed that the instrument had overall good content and construct validity. However, some low frequency items need to be investigated further and some items need to have their criterion levels changed.

The purpose of this study was to determine if the House-Tree-Person Projective Technique (H-T-P) was a valid and efficient method for identifying a problem list for occupational therapy (OT) treatment. In order to do this, a comparative study using blinded procedures was carried out. Forty acute psychiatric clients were administered the H-T-P by a trained research officer who knew nothing about the clients. They were also given an OT assessment by their therapist and a nursing evaluation by their assigned nurse. In each case, a problem list was generated. These were compared for percentage agreement between problems, percentage of problems accounted for and the length of time required to generate the various lists. The percentage agreement between H-T-P and Nursing and between H-T-P and OT generated problem lists was 32.88 and 47.18, respectively. Percentage of problems accounted for was 66.42 and 75.19, respectively. The differences were discussed. The time required to administer the H-T-P was considerably less than administration time for the traditional occupational therapy assessment. In conclusion, the H-T-P was found to be a valuable screening tool.

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The development of a scientific based practice is essential if occupational therapists are to defend their practice against scepticism and budget cuts. In order to equip the profession with the skills necessary to develop a scientific basis for practice, it is generally considered that graduate programs in occupational therapy should be initiated. This paper argues that to be most effective a specific kind of graduate program is required -one based on the scientist-practitioner model. This model provides for the dual education of professionals as clinicians and researchers.In occupational therapy the undergraduate curricula already provide excellent education in clinical interventions. Thus, it is the role of the graduate curricula to provide education in methods of scientific inquiry and their application to clinical practice. The composition of such a curriculum is described.