The Turkish version of the family impact of assistive technology scale: a validity and reliability study.

OBJECTIVE

The purpose of the current study is to estimate the preliminary measurement properties of the Turkish version of Family Impact of assistive technology scale (FIATS-tr).

METHOD

The validity and reliability of the scale was performed in two phases. Phase I focused on construction of the Turkish version of the instrument and pilot testing. The scale was translated using the back-translation technique. The comprehensiveness and clarity of the scale was assessed with 20 participants. Phase II included psychometric assessment of the scale using a classical test theory approach. The final version of the scale was pretested with Turkish-speaking parents (46 mothers, four fathers and five caregivers) of 55 chronically disabled children.

RESULTS

Test-retest reliability was found to be ICC = 0.931 (95% CI 0.881-0.960) for FIATS-tr total. Cronbach's alpha for the overall FIATS-tr was 0.858. Individual alpha values for FIATS-tr subscales ranged from 0.199 to 0.838. The FIATS-tr total was moderately correlated with the functional independence measure for children (WeeFIM) total (r = 0.688, p < 0.001).

CONCLUSIONS

This study showed that overall FIATS-tr appears to have acceptable levels of validity and reliability when used to measure the functional impact of assistive devices. Further study of the constructs and homogeneity of its total and subscales may further improve the internal consistency, validity, and other measurement properties of the FIATS-tr.