Social participation of children and youth with acquired brain injuries discharged from inpatient rehabilitation: a follow-up study

Abstract

Results suggest that greater efforts are needed to address social participation in children and youth with ABI. Information about functional activity at discharge and child and environmental factors may provide insight into post-discharge levels of participation and service needs.

The Child and Adolescent Scale of Environment (CASE): Further validation with youth who have chronic conditions

“…The CASE has reported evidence of test-retest reliability [intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) ¼ 0.75], and internal consistency (Cronbach's ¼ 0.84 and 0.91) [2,9,11,13]. With respect to construct validity, higher CASE scores were significantly associated with lower participation scores on the CASP, with lower functional skills scores on the Pediatric Evaluation of Disability Inventory (PEDI) [21], and with higher impairment scores on the Child Adolescent Factors Inventory (CAFI) [2,9,[11][12][13][14].…”

“…Initial results from factor analyses and Rasch analyses suggested that the CASE is best viewed as an inventory of environmental factors or a multidimensional scale rather than a unidimensional scale [13]. More recent factor analyses identified four main factors that explained 58% of the variance: (1) problems associated with home/community (includes inadequate information, problems with government policies); (2) school-related problems (support, assistance, services, equipment, attitudes); (3) problems with physical design of school, home and community; and (4) other family/ neighborhood problems (family stress, problems with finances, inadequate transportation and neighborhood crime/ violence) [9,11].…”

“…With respect to construct validity, higher CASE scores were significantly associated with lower participation scores on the CASP, with lower functional skills scores on the Pediatric Evaluation of Disability Inventory (PEDI) [21], and with higher impairment scores on the Child Adolescent Factors Inventory (CAFI) [2,9,[11][12][13][14]. More recent analyses demonstrated that as a group, children with chronic conditions/ disabilities had significantly higher CASE scores than children without identified chronic conditions/disabilities [11].…”

“…Physical, social and attitudinal features of the environment have an impact on the participation of children and youth with chronic conditions and disabilities across home, school and community contexts [1][2][3][4][5][6]. Environmental factors are categorized into five broad domains in the World Health Organization's International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) and the more recent child and youth version (ICF-CY) [7,8]: (1) products and technology; (2) natural environment and human-made changes to environment; (3) support and relationships; (4) attitudes; and (5) services, systems and policies.…”

“…(2) To examine the internal consistency of the CASE and the CASE factor subscales that were informed by the components extracted from exploratory factor analyses. (3) To examine the convergent validity of the CASE scores and CASE factor scores through correlation analyses with scores from the Child and Adolescent Scale of Participation (CASP) and Child and Adolescent Factors Inventory (CAFI) [11][12][13][14]. (4) To examine the discriminant (known-groups) validity of the CASE total score and CASE factor scores through analyses of group differences according to primary chronic condition and impairment severity.…”