Inter-rater reliability of the Westmead Post-traumatic Amnesia (PTA) scale
- Resource Type
- Authors
- Paul Hopkins; Karen Bishop; Gina M. Geffen; Julie Connell
- Source
- Australian Occupational Therapy Journal. 41:31-36
- Subject
- Occupational therapy
medicine.medical_specialty
Post-traumatic amnesia
education
Amnesia
medicine.disease
behavioral disciplines and activities
Inter-rater reliability
Occupational Therapy
Scale (social sciences)
Closed head injury
medicine
Physical therapy
medicine.symptom
Psychology
Social psychology
Reliability (statistics)
- Language
- ISSN
- 0045-0766
Clinically useful scales must be reliable. High inter‐rater reliability reduces errors of measurement. The purpose of this study was to assess the agreement between raters in scoring items of the Westmead post‐traumatic amnesia (PTA) scale. Two raters viewed 20 episodes of the Westmead PTA scale in clinical use. The inter‐rater reliability coefficients for the instrument overall and for a majority of the individual items were statistically convincing (r ≥ 0.72) and well within clinically acceptable ranges. The lowest correlation was for the item pertaining to recognition of the examiner's face. A procedure for improving the reliability of scoring this item is recommended. 1994 Occupational Therapy Australia Limited