Short versions of the Timed Manual Performance Test. Development, reliability, and validity

The Timed Manual Performance test is gaining wider use as a measure of functional status in research and clinical settings. It is a rather lengthy 27-item test, however, requiring the use of a large cumbersome panel of doors. The authors, therefore, studied 1,286 community-dwelling elderly subjects recruited through their primary care provider to: 1) reduce the number of items in the Timed Manual Performance (TMP) test and 2) assess the reliability and validity of the shorter versions of the TMP compared with the 27-item TMP. Using principal components analysis, we identified two shorter measures, TMP (Doors) consisting of five board tasks and TMP (Table) consisting of six table tasks. Timed Manual Performance (Doors) and TMP (Table) involve less equipment than the original TMP and have higher rates of completion. Furthermore, not only are these tests reliable (alpha = 0.79 and 0.82 for TMP [Doors] and TMP [Table], respectively), they appear to be better measures of manual performance compared with the 27-item TMP.