Research Program

Research Project 4: A New Measure of the Objective and Subjective Aspects of Participation (PART-OS)

Overview

This project encompasses the second phase of the development of the PART measurement tool, which is currently being developed by eight TBI Model Systems. The PART is a measure of participation in social, vocational and domestic activities at home and in the community. During the first phase, the Model Systems focused on the development of an objective measure of participation. R4 is now focusing on developing, testing and finalizing a parallel subjective measure. The PART-OS (i.e., PART with both objective and subjective elements) will assess participation from two perspectives: subjective, representing the values, preferences and satisfactions of the person being measured, and objective, representing societal values.

Goal

• Finalize the development of a measure of participation (PART-OS) that incorporates both objective and subjective perspectives on this core rehabilitation outcome.

Participation refers to engagement in social, vocational, and domestic activities in the home and community. Participation may serve as a goal area in rehabilitation, and, when it does, the question arises as to how goals should be framed. On the one hand, goals can be stated in terms of an increase in the person's participation or the person's participation becoming more like "societal norms," that is, more like the average. Alternatively, goals might be stated in terms formulated by the person in treatment — idiosyncratic goals that may or may not reflect societal norms and may or may not emphasize "doing more." However, when it comes to measuring success, most current participation measures only provide information on the person's quantity of participation, not the person's evaluation of level or type of participation. The basic idea of the PART-OS measure is to allow both objective and subjective perspectives of participation to be measured — objective, in terms of determining quantity of participation, and subjective, in terms of obtaining the person's perspective on his/her participation. Recently, eight of the NIDRR-funded TBI Model Systems engaged in a collaborative project in which they collected objective data on items culled from four existing measures of participation. In R4, the results of this initial effort (a set of "good" participation items) is being developed into a measure that generates both an objective and subjective score.