Measurement of participation in rehabilitation research.

The Rehabilitation Research and Training Center on Measuring Rehabilitation Outcomes and Effectiveness sponsored a 2-day International Symposium on Measurement of Participation in Rehabilitation Research in October 2008 as a preconference to the annual meeting of the American Congress of Rehabilitation Medicine and the American Society of Neurorehabilitation. The aims of the symposium were to highlight the state of the art in the measurement of participation and discuss its utility as an outcome measure for persons with disabilities by examining the construct of participation and its measurement. Plenary presentations and group discussions were organized around 4 key issues: (1) conceptualization, (2) operationalization, (3) environmental influences, and (4) personal characteristics. The full set of symposium articles, including recommendations for future research, appears in this supplement to Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation.