Participation and Environment Project
Description
The Participation and Environment Project is a research project focused on developing new measures of participation and environment for children with disabilities. This study is a collaboration between researchers in the United States and Canada. There are 3 phases of this study:
- The first phase is to develop content for questions and domains or groupings of questions that will best capture participation and environment. This will be achieved by combining research on existing measures with information that is obtained from conducting semi-structured interviews and focus groups with parents and children with disabilities between the ages of 6-16 yrs. Interviews will focus on children's participation in activities across environments such as at home, in school and in the community.
- In the second phase, item pools will be developed based on this data, be reviewed by experts, cognitively tested and then field tested with caregivers and children with disabilities.
- In the third phase, the measurement will be refined and then field tested with a larger audience through both web-based survey and paper methods to further examine the properties of revised item pools. The main objective of the project is to develop a large pool of items related to participation and environment that can be drawn from to create short and long versions of participation surveys for different populations and different surveying methods that will be comparable.
Research Team
- Wendy Coster
- Mary Law
- Gary Bedell (Co-PIs)
- Mary Khetani
- Vasundra Ghanju
- Martha Cousins
Funders
US Department of Education, National Institute for Disability and Rehabilitation Research (NIDRR) (2007-2010).
Outcomes/Measures
Participation
Resources
Boston University, Sargent College project website
Presentations
To be presented at the Gatlinburg Conference on Research & Theory in Intellectual & Developmental Disabilities 2009 March 18-20th, New Orleans, Louisiana:
Khetani M, Bedell G, Coster W, Law M (2009). Environmental Influences on the Social Participation of Children with Developmental Disabilities: Parent and Child Perspectives Informing Measurement Development.
To be presented at the 2009 AOTA Annual Conference and Expo April 23-26, Houston, Texas:
Bedell G, Khetani M, Coster W, Law M (2009). Developing Measures Of Participation And Environment For Children With Disabilities: Parent Perspectives.