Reliability of the Family Impact of Assistive Technology Scale for Augmentative and Alternative Communication Systems (FIATS-AAC)
Casey Eisenberg1, Stephanie Horner1,Anne Marie Renzoni2,and StephenRyan1,2, Department of Occupational Science & Occupational Therapy, University of Toronto1 and Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital2
Objective: Todevelop further and estimate the internal reliability of the Family Impact of Assistive Technology Scale for Augmentative and Alternative Communication Systems (FIATS-AAC) – a questionnaire intended to detect the influence of AAC systems on the lives ofchildren with communication impairments and their families.
Target Population:Children and youth with communication impairments and their families.
Introduction/Background:An AAC systemis a set of technologies and approaches intended to improvethe communicative functioning of individuals who do not speak or whose speech is not intelligible. Although the benefits of AAC systems areintuitively apparent, little proof exists to support their functional effectiveness in children and their families. Empirical evidence of the role and effect of AAC systems is hindered partly due to the lack of appropriate outcome measures. The FIATS-AAC is an emerging, parent-report questionnaireintended to detect the functional impact of AAC systemson the lives of children with communication impairments and their families. Earlier investigations showed that the FIATS-AAC had good content validity and face validity. The preliminary version of thescale had 95 items assigned to one of 13 child-, parent- and family-related dimensions.
Methods:Parents whose children were 6 to 18 years old and had received AAC services from Holland Bloorview teams after January 2007 were eligible to participate. We mailed a random sample of 439 eligible parents to invite each to complete the FIATS-AAC questionnaire. Parents optionally completed a hard-copy version or an on-line version of the questionnaire. The returned questionnaires were anonymous, but included basic demographic information to describe the respondents, children, and types of AAC systems used. Using response data and following an a priori correlation threshold, we eliminated items that correlated poorly with their assigned subscales. Cronbach’s alpha provided estimates of the internal consistencies of the revised total FIATS-AAC and its 13 subscales.
Results: We received 141 responses from 396 non-returned mailings (37% response rate). Of these, 135 responses had sufficient data to include in the reliability analyses. Six items with low item-corrected total subscale correlations were eliminated from the scale. Internal consistency was acceptable for the total scale (α = .91) and each of its 13 subscales (.66≤α ≤.90).
Conclusions:The revised FIATS-AAC and its subscales have acceptable levels of internal reliability. Further research will help to estimate its stability, responsiveness to change, and utility as an outcome measure for research and clinical service applications.