BACKGROUND: The Foot Posture Index (FPI) has been advocated as a simple and convenient tool to assess static foot posture in a clinical setting. Although published studies have indicated that the FPI has good intrarater reliability and moderate interrater reliability, these studies were conducted on a previous version of the tool that used eight criteria to score a patient's foot posture. The revised tool has only six criteria (FPI-6). The purpose, therefore, of this study was to investigate the intrarater and interrater reliability of the revised version of the FPI. METHODS: Three different raters used the FPI-6 to twice evaluate 92 feet from 46 individuals. RESULTS: Intrarater reliability was high but interrater reliability was only moderate. In addition, using the raw score generated by the FPI-6 to classify feet into one of five categories did not improve agreement between raters. CONCLUSIONS: The FPI-6 should be used with extreme caution and may actually have limited value, especially from a research perspective.
BACKGROUND: The Foot Posture Index (FPI) has been advocated as a simple and convenient tool to assess static foot posture in a clinical setting. Although published studies have indicated that the FPI has good intrarater reliability and moderate interrater reliability, these studies were conducted on a previous version of the tool that used eight criteria to score a patient's foot posture. The revised tool has only six criteria (FPI-6). The purpose, therefore, of this study was to investigate the intrarater and interrater reliability of the revised version of the FPI. METHODS: Three different raters used the FPI-6 to twice evaluate 92 feet from 46 individuals. RESULTS: Intrarater reliability was high but interrater reliability was only moderate. In addition, using the raw score generated by the FPI-6 to classify feet into one of five categories did not improve agreement between raters. CONCLUSIONS: The FPI-6 should be used with extreme caution and may actually have limited value, especially from a research perspective.
Authors: Stephanie R Albin; Shane L Koppenhaver; Brooke Bailey; Hilary Blommel; Brad Fenter; Chris Lowrimore; Andrew C Smith; Thomas G McPoil Journal: Foot (Edinb) Date: 2019-01-11