Reliability of the Danish version of the McGill Ingestive Skills Assessment for observation-based measures during...

To establish measurement equivalence in terms of reliability of the Danish version of the Canadian McGill ingestive skills assessment (MISA) for use by occupational therapists.

A cross-sectional two-rater and test-retest design was applied. A total of 102 elderly medical patients were included consecutively, and were video-recorded during a meal. Raters were paired randomly for each video-case, which was re-scored within three to eight weeks. Reliability was evaluated with the intra-class correlation coefficients (ICC), the standard error of measurement (SEM), the smallest detectable change (SDC), and limits of agreement (LOA).

Inter-rater reliability was good to excellent (ICC (1.1) 0.61-0.84) and intra-rater reliability was excellent (ICC (3.1) 0.84-0.93). For the total scale, SEM was 7% between raters and 4% in repeated measurement by the same rater. For the absolute total scale range on 86 points, the SDC was 15.8 between raters and 10.3 in repeated measurement by the same rater.

The reliability of the Danish MISA equals the original version and is suitable for clinical practice. When extending the evaluation of the reproducibility, weaker precision was evident when measurements are repeated by different raters than by the same rater. Therefore further investigation of rater effects is recommended.