Assessing participation of children with acquired brain injury and cerebral palsy: a systematic review of measurement properties.
Christine Resch, Mette Van Kruijsbergen, Marjolijn Ketelaar and 6 others
PMID 31975385WHAT IT FOUND
Only 12 of 37 tools used to measure participation in children with brain injury or cerebral palsy align with attendance or involvement.
Evidence that they work well in these children is limited, so match the tool to the clinical question.
Key findings
01The review identified 37 instruments used to quantify participation in children with ABI or CP, and 12 aligned exclusively with attendance or involvement.
02Eight of the 12 aligned instruments had been tested in children with ABI or CP, and 14 studies examined those tests.
03No included study examined content validity according to COSMIN criteria, so no information on content validity was available.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for PTs
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What it does not show
No study checked whether the items fully cover participation for children with acquired brain injury or cerebral palsy using the review's standard. Many studies were published before the review's quality standards and were rated doubtful or inadequate, so some evidence about the tools could not be judged. Some studies combined different language versions, self-report and proxy-report versions, or data from more than one country, and it was not shown that these versions measure the same thing. Small samples and comparisons with tools that measure different concepts limit confidence in the validity findings. The search may have missed studies that used broader terms such as children with physical disabilities but still included many children with acquired brain injury or cerebral palsy.
The easy way to misread this
Do not assume any participation tool is fully validated for children with acquired brain injury or cerebral palsy. The review found no tool with sufficient evidence for every aspect of how well it measures, and many ratings were unclear or based on low-quality studies.