Development, Reliability and Validity of Engagement in Exercise Rehabilitation Scale for Patients with Stroke

Area of Science:

• Rehabilitation Medicine
• Psychometrics
• Neuroscience

Background:

• Exercise rehabilitation is vital for stroke recovery, especially during home or community reintegration.
• A gap exists in self-reported measures for assessing patient engagement in stroke exercise rehabilitation.
• This study addresses the need for a validated scale to quantify patient engagement.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop and validate the psychometric properties of the Engagement in Exercise Rehabilitation Scale (EERS) for stroke patients.
• To create a reliable and valid tool for measuring patient engagement in post-stroke exercise.
• To assess patients' perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors related to exercise rehabilitation.

Main Methods:

• Item pool generation through literature review and patient interviews.
• Expert consultation and cognitive interviews for item refinement.
• Psychometric testing (validity, reliability) on 260 stroke patients.

Main Results:

• The final 20-item Engagement in Exercise Rehabilitation Scale demonstrated strong content validity (CVI=0.976).
• Exploratory factor analysis confirmed a unidimensional structure with 79.3% variance explained.
• Excellent reliability was found: test-retest (0.879), split-half (0.980), and Cronbach's α (0.986).

Conclusions:

• The Engagement in Exercise Rehabilitation Scale is a reliable and valid instrument for stroke patients.
• This scale can effectively measure patient engagement in exercise rehabilitation.
• Further multi-center validation studies are recommended for broader generalizability.