title: Inter-rater reliability of the Play Assessment for Group Settings.
abstract: Play Assessment for Group Settings (PAGS) was originally designed to measure the play ability of 2- to 8-year-old children in their natural day-care context and for the use of different professionals. The main purpose of this study was to examine the inter-rater reliability of the PAGS. Twelve raters from different professional backgrounds scored a total of 78 children, both videotaped co-scored cases and individual live cases. The many-faceted Rasch model (MFR) was used to examine the goodness-of-fit of the rater severity estimates. Of the 12 raters, 91.7% were demonstrated to fit the MFR model expectations. Overall the results of this study indicated that the raters scored the PAGS in a reliable way, and that they behaved like independent experts. The separation index (2.09) of the raters indicated that the inter-rater scorings were comparable with each other for practical purposes. Further research on the different response processes of children in different diagnostic groups is needed.
authors.affiliation: JAMK University of Applied Sciences, Rehabilitation and Social Studies, Jyväskylä, Finland. tiina.lautamo@jamk.fi
authors.forename: Tiina
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Lautamo
authors.forename: Maija
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Heikkilä
mesh_terms: D002648:Child; D002652:Child Behavior; D002656:Child Day Care Centers; D002657:Child Development; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005104:Expert Testimony; D005260:Female; D006126:Group Processes; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008960:Models, Psychological; D015588:Observer Variation; D009788:Occupational Therapy / Q000379:methods* / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D010988:Play and Playthings / Q000523:psychology*; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012107:Research Design; D014741:Video Recording