Development of content-valid technical skill assessment instruments for athletic taping skills.

Background And Purpose: The content validity of technical skill assessment instruments (TSAI) for the skills of athletic taping has not been reported. The purpose of this paper is to outline and present the process of content validation for nine TSAIs for athletic taping. Local and national validators were selected from Canadian Athletic Therapists' Association (CATA)-accredited athletic therapy (AT) programs to serve as content validators.

Methods: The process of content validation began with the creation of a detailed task analysis via mail and simple validation by local validators. Subsequently, the detailed task analysis was committee validated by a group of 10 validators from across Canada. Validators judged the importance and difficulty of each item, and a face-to-face committee-validator meeting established consensus on the majority of checklist items. Through a modified Ebel procedure, frequency distribution was used in the formation of the final TSAIs.

Results: Initial consensus for pre-taping assessment and technical skill performance items was low. Upon committee discussion and lack of agreement, the decision to remove pretaping assessment items was made. Initial results of importance and difficulty for athletic taping technical skills were low prior to the committee meeting. Results of importance and difficulty improved substantially following the face-to-face committee-validators meeting. Consensus on fail points improved from initial to final committee validation.

Conclusion: The process of simple and committee validation can be seen as effective methods to establish the content validity of instruments used for the evaluation of athletic taping.