Occupational assessment: the Activity Matching Ability System (AMAS)

This paper describes a new scheme of assessment originally developed to help standardize return-to-work procedures for disabled steel workers. Two compatible techniques of assessment were designed which itemize 100 work demands and the functional abilities of disabled employees to perform these on a simple, ordinal scale. The techniques were evaluated in terms of face and content validity, the inter-rater agreement for coding job demands and the compatibility between levels of item for 55 disabled subjects and their existing jobs. Further reliability testing is in progress; then the efficacy of the system will be evaluated.