Psychometric evaluation of a short observational tool for small-scale research projects in dementia

Dementia is a degenerating illness and the lack of a reliable measure of self-report in particular presents particular difficulties for research. Often in the later stages of dementia behavioural measurement is the only tool available for the evaluation of treatment techniques. This paper describes and evaluates a short observational tool suitable for clinical assessment purposes. The scale has been shown to have the potential for adequate inter-rater reliability, test retest reliability, and convergent and divergent validity, if the study limitations reflecting statistical rather than ecological validity, and limitations of sample size are borne in mind.