Self-Awareness Multilevel Assessment Scale (SAMAS): psychometric analysis of inter-rater reliability

Severe acquired brain injury (sABI) frequently causes impairment in self-awareness (ISA), leading to reduced patients' compliance to treatment, worse functional outcome, and high caregiver distress. Self-awareness (SA) is a multilevel and complex function that, as such, requires a specific and effective assessment. To date, many tools are available to evaluate the declarative, but not emergent and anticipatory levels of awareness, therefore the Self-Awareness Multilevel Assessment Scale (SAMAS) was recently proposed. The new tool proved to be useful to assess SA at different levels across all domains of functioning (motor, cognitive, psycho-behavioural, etc.) because it measures not only the declarative SA, but also emergent and anticipatory levels of SA, thus overcoming some important limits of other current assessment methods.

This study evaluated the inter-rater reliability (IRR) of the SAMAS.

Four professionals blind to each other evaluated 12 patients with sABI. Each patient was rated by two professionals.

Inter-rater reliability was moderate-to-excellent, adding evidence in support of the use of SAMAS to specifically diagnose ISA after sABI.

The SAMAS can help to better address neurorehabilitation, as it allows assessing ISA as early as possible, at all possible levels of awareness and functional domains.