Visual assessment of movement quality in the single leg squat test: a review and meta-analysis of inter-rater and intrarater reliability.

Unlabelled: Single leg squat (SLS) is a common tool used in clinical examination to set and evaluate rehabilitation goals, but also to assess lower extremity function in active people.

Objectives: To conduct a review and meta-analysis on the inter-rater and intrarater reliability of the SLS, including the lateral step-down (LSD) and forward step-down (FSD) tests.

Design: Review with meta-analysis.

Data Sources: CINAHL, Cochrane Library, Embase, Medline (OVID) and Web of Science was searched up until December 2018.

Eligibility Criteria: Studies were eligible for inclusion if they were methodological studies which assessed the inter-rater and/or intrarater reliability of the SLS, FSD and LSD through observation of movement quality.

Results: Thirty-one studies were included. The reliability varied largely between studies (inter-rater: kappa/intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC) = 0.00-0.95; intrarater: kappa/ICC = 0.13-1.00), but most of the studies reached 'moderate' measures of agreement. The pooled results of ICC/kappa showed a 'moderate' agreement for inter-rater reliability, 0.58 (95% CI 0.50 to 0.65), and a 'substantial' agreement for intrarater reliability, 0.68 (95% CI 0.60 to 0.74). Subgroup analyses showed a higher pooled agreement for inter-rater reliability of ≤3-point rating scales while no difference was found for different numbers of segmental assessments.

Conclusion: Our findings indicate that the SLS test including the FSD and LSD tests can be suitable for clinical use regardless of number of observed segments and particularly with a ≤3-point rating scale. Since most of the included studies were affected with some form of methodological bias, our findings must be interpreted with caution.PROSPERO registration numberCRD42018077822.