Informant Report of Financial Capacity for Individuals With Chronic Acquired Brain Injury: An Assessment of Informant Accuracy.
Preeti Sunderaraman, Stephanie Cosentino, Karen Lindgren and 2 others
PMID 29601341WHAT IT FOUND
In 22 pairs, informant reports did not track how people with chronic acquired brain injury performed on financial tasks.
Overall scores looked similar, but informants misjudged 6 of 20 items. Some were overestimated and some underestimated.
Key findings
01On the 20-item objective financial score, participants averaged 49.41 and informants estimated 50.12, but the two were not associated (r = 0.159, p = 0.48).
02The average total difference between informant estimate and actual score was 0.77 points and was not significantly different from zero.
03Informants were significantly discrepant on six of twenty items: three were overestimates and three were underestimates.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for OTs
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What it does not show
The study analysed only 22 informant-patient pairs, so it was small. Participants were all described as having moderate to severe injury and living in a supported community, and the sample was demographically narrow, with older white men as the main group. People with depression, psychiatric disturbances, substance-abuse treatment, estimated premorbid intellectual ability below 70, severe sensory or motor deficits, or active lawsuits were excluded. The Financial Competence Assessment Inventory was still being validated, and the 20-item objective subset used here had not been fully validated. Informants were mostly professional staff; only 3 were family members, and the study did not measure informant burden or negative affect. Medical records did not always contain initial injury severity information, so eligibility relied partly on neuropsychologist review.
Declared interests
No conflicts of interest were reported.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that informant reports are accurate because the average total score looked similar. The study found no association between informant report and objective performance, and informants significantly misjudged six of twenty individual items.