Stability of person ability measures in people with acquired brain injury in the use of everyday technology: the test-retest reliability of the Management of Everyday Technology Assessment (META)

Aim: To evaluate the test-retest reliability of the Management of Everyday Technology Assessment (META) in a sample of people with acquired brain injury (ABI). Method: The META was administered twice within a two-week period to 25 people with ABI. A Rasch measurement model was used to convert the META ordinal raw scores into equal-interval linear measures of each participant's ability to manage everyday technology (ET). Test-retest reliability of the stability of the person ability measures in the META was examined by a standardized difference Z-test and an intra-class correlations analysis (ICC 1). Results: The results showed that the paired person ability measures generated from the META were stable over the test-retest period for 22 of the 25 subjects. The ICC 1 correlation was 0.63, which indicates good overall reliability. Conclusion: The META demonstrated acceptable test-retest reliability in a sample of people with ABI. The results illustrate the importance of using sufficiently challenging ETs (relative to a person's abilities) to generate stable META measurements over time.