My Family’s Accessibility and Community Engagement (My Face): initial development of a new tool

Introduction:hildren with a disability and their families may access and participatein community-based activities to a lesser extent than families of typically developingchildren for various reasons. There are few instruments that measure the extent towhich a family feels both included and involved within activities in their local com-munity. My FACE was designed to provide families with a means to measure accessto community and need for change to facilitate involvement for the family and childwith a disability.Objectives:To report on investigations into the content and construct validity andinternal reliability of My FACE. To describe the tool itself including scoring and clini-cal utility of this family centred self-report tool.Method:Data were collected using several methods including anonymous online sur-vey and parallel data collection within a project for mothers. Australian mothers andfathers of children with a disability were included in the final cohort (N=113). Thesurvey included demographic questions, My FACE, as well as standardised measuresof health, leisure participation and quality of life. Guided by the COnsensus-basedStandards for the selection of health Measurement INstruments, internal consistencyreliability was investigated through measurement of Cronbach’s alpha; structuralvalidity using principal components analysis, construct validity through explorationof research hypotheses developed a priori.Results:Initial data analysis revealed a sound instrument with adequate internal reli-ability and construct validity. Exact results were unavailable at the time of abstractsubmission.Conclusion:Initial investigations of My Face demonstrate that community inclusionis a complex phenomenon and that families are able to self-rate their own desire forchanges in community involvement and inclusion suggesting that goal setting andchange management may also be both managed and measured by the family. Furtherinvestigations of the psychometric features of My Face are required to determine suit-ability as an outcome measure