Summary of an occupational therapy journal article

¶ … Motor and Process Skills among Blacks and Whites

As its title suggests, the purpose of the research in this journal article was to learn if the Assessment of Motor and Process Skills (AMPS), which is an assessment of daily living in personal and domestic activities (ADL), can be utilized as a "valid, nonbiased tool when assessing black Americans," according to the introduction (Stauffer, et al., 2000). Why such research is necessary, as explained by the authors, is that when occupational therapists study blacks, they want to be sure that statistical bias and incorrect assumptions to not enter into the equation.

As of 1999, roughly 13% of the American population was African-American, amounting to about 33.8 million people. But within the black population, there are distinctive subgroups, and so, across-the-board occupational generalizations are risky, in terms of researchers' need to achieve - and report - accurate, usable data.

The AMPS, Stauffer explains, serves as a tool to measure the "effectiveness of a person's occupational performance" in a "culturally relevant context" (p. 608). The AMPS has built into it 76 different "standardized personal and domestic activities of daily living (ADL)," Stauffer continues. The framework for AMPS, Stauffer states, also on page 608, is simply a "meaningful sequence of actions in which the person enacts and completes a specified task," a task that has relevance to the person's culture, or roles played in daily life.

In this particular study, the participants were 466 African-Americans, and 466 Caucasian-Americans, selected from an AMPS database which met these criteria: 1) at least 16 years of age; 2) had a history of neurological, musculoskeletal, medical, developmental, cognitive, or psychiatric disorders - or, were "healthy older persons"; 3) had a residence in North America.

The participants were matched according to gender, functional levels of ability, age and diagnosis, and the examination for bias was a "between group comparison" of: a) "item difficulty and task challenge hierarchies of the AMPS"; b) "goodness-of-fit of the participants to the many faceted Rasch (MFR) Model"; and c) "mean ADL motor and ADL process abilities."

How did the researchers know, for example, that their tests in this instance would be free of bias? A test is determined to be bias-free, according to the author (p. 608), when the "set of items or tasks that comprise the test does not place any given subgroup at an unfair disadvantage because an item or task is less difficult for members of that subgroup than for members of another subgroup." And why was this specific study needed, even though the AMPS has previously been examined in Europe and North America, and among blacks in the U.S. The author (p. 610) reports that additional research was needed because previous studies did not survey a large enough sampling to get the full picture of blacks' responses to the AMPS.

Conclusion