TBI-QOL Communication short form with children (Cohen et al., 2019)

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to evaluate the internal consistency and construct validity of the Traumatic Brain Injury Quality of Life Communication Item Bank (TBI-QOL COM) short form as a parent-proxy report measure. The TBI-QOL COM is a patient-reported outcome measure of functional communication originally developed as a self-report measure for adults with traumatic brain injury (TBI), but it may also be valid as a parent-proxy report measure for children who have sustained TBI.Method: One hundred twenty-nine parent-proxy raters completed the TBI-QOL COM short form 6 months postinjury as a secondary aim of a multisite study of pediatric TBI outcomes. The respondents’ children with TBI were between 8 and 18 years old (Mage = 13.2 years old) at the time of injury, and the proportion of TBI severity mirrored national trends (73% complicated–mild; 27% moderate or severe).Results: The parent-proxy report version of the TBI-QOL COM displayed strong internal consistency (ordinal α = .93). It also displayed evidence of known-groups validity by virtue of more severe injuries associated with more abnormal scores. The instrument also showed evidence of convergent and discriminant validity by displaying a pattern of correlations with other constructs according to their conceptual relatedness to functional communication.Conclusions: This preliminary psychometric investigation of the TBI-QOL COM supports the further development of a parent report version of the instrument. Future development of the TBI-QOL COM with this population may include expanding the content of the item bank and developing calibrations specifically for parent-proxy raters.Supplemental Material S1. Comparison of completers vs. noncompleters at 6 months. Cohen, M. L., Tulsky, D. S., Boulton, A. J., Kisala, P. A., Kertisch, H., Yeates, K. O., . . . Rivara, F. P. (2019). Reliability and construct validity of the TBI-QOL Communication short form as a parent-proxy report instrument for children with traumatic brain injury. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1044/2018_JSLHR-L-18-0074