Responsiveness of the Impact on Participation and Autonomy questionnaire.

OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the responsiveness of a newly developed generic questionnaire, the Impact on Participation and Autonomy (IPA), which focuses on 2 aspects of participation: perceived participation and the experience of problems.
DESIGN: Preliminary study of questionnaire responsiveness compared with transition indices. Participants completed 2 assessments, 3 months apart. To measure change, they completed 9 transition indices at the second assessment. One transition index assessed perceived change in general, the other 8 addressed 1 of the specific problem experience items in the IPA.
SETTING: Outpatient clinic of the rehabilitation department of an academic hospital. PARTICIPANTS: Fifty-seven consecutive persons admitted for multidisciplinary rehabilitation treatment, with various diagnoses, were enrolled in the study; 49 persons completed both assessments.
INTERVENTIONS: Not applicable. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Standardized response mean (SRM) and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) for participation domain scores and problem scores.
RESULTS: SRMs and AUCs for the participation domains ranged from 0.1 to 1.3 and from 50% to 92%, respectively. The SRMs of the items on the experience of problems ranged from 0.4 to 1.5, whereas their AUCs ranged from 56% to 74%.
CONCLUSIONS: The IPA detected within-person improvement over time, but its responsiveness must be confirmed in a larger study sample. Copyright 2002 by the American Congress of Rehabilitation Medicine and the American Academy of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation