title: Examining construct validity of a new naturalistic observational assessment of hand skills for preschool- and school-age children.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  The Assessment of Children's Hand Skills is a new assessment that utilises a naturalistic observational method to capture children's real-life hand skill performance when engaged at various types of daily activities in everyday living contexts. The Assessment of Children's Hand Skills is designed for use with 2- to 12-year-old children with a range of disabilities or health conditions. The study aimed to investigate construct validity of the Assessment of Children's Hand Skills in Australian children.
  
  
  METHODS
  Rasch analysis was used to examine internal construct validity of the Assessment of Children's Hand Skills in a mixed sample of 53 children with disabilities (including autism spectrum disorder, developmental/genetic disorders and physical disabilities) and 85 typically developing children. External construct validity was examined by correlating with three questionnaires evaluating daily living skills and hand skills.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Rasch goodness-of-fit analysis suggested that all 22 activity items and 19 of 20 hand skill items in the Assessment of Children's Hand Skills measured a single construct. The Assessment of Children's Hand Skills items were placed in a clinically meaningful hierarchy from easy to hard, and the difficulty range of the items also matched the majority of children with disabilities and typically developing preschool-aged children. Moderate to high correlations (0.59 ≤ Spearman's ρ coefficients ≤ 0.89, P < 0.01) were found with the assessments of daily living and fine motor skills.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  This study provided preliminary evidence supporting the construct validity of the Assessment of Children's Hand Skills for its clinical application in assessing children's real-life hand skill performance in Australian contexts.
authors.affiliation: Division of Occupational Therapy, School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. c.chien@uq.edu.au
authors.forename: Chi-Wen
authors.initials: CW
authors.lastname: Chien
authors.forename: Ted
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Brown
authors.forename: Rachael
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: McDonald
mesh_terms: D000367:Age Factors; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D004185:Disability Evaluation; D019988:Children with Disabilities; D005260:Female; D006225:Hand / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009048:Motor Skills / Q000502:physiology*; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D018709:Statistics, Nonparametric; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D013647:Task Performance and Analysis