Reliability of the family impact of assistive technology scale for families of young children with cerebral palsy.

Objective: To examine the internal consistency and test-retest reliability of the Family Impact of Assistive Technology Scale (FIATS) when used to measure the perceptions of parents about important aspects of family life that may be influenced by their children's use of assistive devices.

Design: Repeated measure.

Setting: Homes of 50 participating families.

Participants: Parents of young children with cerebral palsy.

Interventions: Not applicable.

Main Outcome Measure: The FIATS.

Results: Through an a priori item-reduction process, we reduced the length of the FIATS from 89 to 64 items. We retained 8 of the 9 original subscales. The 8 subscales included the following: autonomy, caregiver relief, contentment, doing activities, effort, family and social interaction, caregiver supervision, and safety. Remaining items of the removed subscale (technology acceptance) correlated well with the subscale total, but did not relate well to the FIATS total score. This construct was retained as a separate but noncontributing scale within the FIATS. The overall FIATS and its 8 contributing subscales had acceptable internal consistencies and test-retest reliabilities.

Conclusions: The FIATS shows promise as a homogeneous and reproducible multidimensional measure of dimensions of child and family life. We plan further testing to examine the sensitivity and clinical meaningfulness of change scores on the FIATS.