Development of a measure of communication activity for the acute hospital setting: Part 11 Item analysis, selection and reliability.

This article is the second in a two-part series that describes the development of the Inpatient Functional Communication Interview (IFCI; O'Halloran, Worrall, Toffolo, Code, & Hickson, 2004). The first study (O'Halloran, Worrall, & Hickson, 2007) investigated two measures of communication activity for the acute hospital setting and concluded that the assessment items on these measures did not adequately reflect the range and type of communication activities that were actually observed during hospital staff and patient communication and concluded that neither assessment was suitable for use in the acute hospital setting. This second article describes how a new measure of communication activity for the acute hospital setting, the IFCI, was developed using the communication situations that were observed in the first phase of this research. The Multiple Attribute Utility Technique (MAUT; Edwards & Newman, 1982) was used to select a smaller number of communication situations needed for a short clinical assessment from the larger pool identified from the observation study. Finally, a preliminary investigation of the IFCI indicated 90.7% interrater reliability and 93.8% intrarater reliability. Therefore, it was concluded that the IFCI was a reliable measure of staff-patient communication in everyday activities in the hospital setting