VALIDITY AND RELIABILITY OF FUNCTIONAL TESTS AND QUESTIONNAIRES FOR CHILDREN WITH A CONGENITAL UPPER LIMB REDUCTION DEFICIENCY

Abstract

Standardized measures are required to adequately measure arm and prosthetic functioning in children with unilateral upper limb reduction deficiency (ULRD). A prerequisite for a test or questionnaire is that the instrument has to actually measure what it is supposed to measure, also referred to as validity. With respect to validity, functional tests and questionnaires that are able to measure arm or prosthetic functioning were selected according to the following criteria: (i) they had to be attractive for children aged 4 to 12, (ii) they had to represent bimanual activities and (iii) they had to score quality of movement (functional tests) and/or difficulty (questionnaires) [1]. According to these criteria, we selected two functional tests, the Assisting Hand Assessment (AHA) [2] and the Unilateral Below Elbow Test (UBET) [3, 4] and two questionnaires, the Prosthetic Upper extremity Functional Index (PUFI) [5, 6] and ABILHAND-Kids [7]. In the present study we make a head-to-head comparison of these instruments to judge their clinical usefulness and to identify the best functional test and the best questionnaire for children with ULRD.