Article

Confidence is a construct that has not been explored previously in aphasia
research. We developed the Communication Confidence Rating Scale for Aphasia
(CCRSA) to assess confidence in communicating in a variety of activities and
evaluated its psychometric properties using rating scale (Rasch) analysis. The
CCRSA was administered to 21 individuals with aphasia before and after
participation in a computer-based language therapy study. Person reliability of
the 8-item CCRSA was .77. The 5-category rating scale demonstrated monotonic
increases in average measures from low to high ratings. However, one item ("I
follow news, sports, stories on TV/movies") misfit the construct defined by the
other items (mean square infit = 1.69, item-measure correlation = .41). Deleting
this item improved reliability to .79; the 7 remaining items demonstrated
excellent fit to the underlying construct, although there was a modest ceiling
effect in this sample. Pre- to posttreatment changes on the 7-item CCRSA measure
were statistically significant using a paired samples t test. Findings support
the reliability and sensitivity of the CCRSA in assessing participants'
self-report of communication confidence. Further evaluation of communication
confidence is required with larger and more diverse samples.

Langue : ANGLAIS