ESTABLISHING RELIABILITY AND VALIDITY OF "DO WORK:" A DYNAMIC OBSERVATIONAL ASSESSMENT OF WORK PERFORMANCE IN A COMPUTERIZED ENVIRONMENT FOR PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES

Background: As part of the rehabilitation process, vocational rehabilitation practitioners use various work ability assessments. Most of those assessment are static, and do not refer to the person’s learning potential and... [ view full abstract ]

Background: As part of the rehabilitation process, vocational rehabilitation practitioners use various work ability assessments. Most of those assessment are static, and do not refer to the person’s learning potential and the mediation needed for him/her to succeed in the work task. The purpose of the following research is to examine initial reliability and validity of a new, dynamic observational assessment of work performance in a computerized work environment for people with disabilities.
Method: As a pilot, 15 healthy students went through the assessment process, resulting with minor changes to the assessment tool. Next, five vocational rehabilitation practitioners reviewed the tool to test content validity. We then began data collection. Up to this point, 15 subjects, between the ages of 22-52 (M=32.40, SD= 7.6) who have been diagnosed with psychiatric disability and receive vocational rehabilitation services, went through the research procedure.
Results: The experts affirmed content validity: the inter-rater reliability resulted in a high percent agreement (95%) between four raters. In terms of criterion validity, we found a moderate yet significant correlation between the general score of the DO WORK assessment and the general score of the AWP assessment in the pilot group (r=0.68, p=0.008), and a strong, significant correlation between the processing skills of the AWP and the mediation score of the DO-WORK (r=-0.758, p=0.002).
Conclusions: The DO WORK assessment was found to be valid and reliable, and thus offers a dynamic assessment method for people with disabilities in a computerized work environment.