title: Inexperienced examiners and the Foot Posture Index: A reliability study.
abstract: The Foot Posture Index (FPI-6) is a reliable (experienced examiners) assessment tool used in clinical practice to classify foot posture. No work has been completed to determine the reliability of the FPI-6 between novice examiners. Therefore, the aim was to determine the inter-examiner reliability of the FPI-6 using two novice examiners (graduate level osteopathy students). The FPI-6 was used to classify the feet of 83 students recruited as part of a larger study. Data were collected simultaneously by both examiners, but there was no communication between them. The scoring system provided by the FPI-6 manual was used to assess all feet. Collated data were assessed between examiners for reliability based on raw, transformed and foot type scores. The inter-examiner reliability was high for both left (intra-class correlation coefficient ICC2,1= 0.86) and right (ICC2,1= 0.85) feet for the novice examiners. When data were assessed based on foot type classification the examiners agreed on 76% of the left feet and 82% of the right feet with Kappa values of 0.73 and 0.72 respectively. The FPI-6 is a robust clinical tool that can be reliably utilised by inexperienced clinicians.
authors.affiliation: College of Health and Biomedicine, Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia; Centre for Chronic Disease Prevention and Management, Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia; Institute for Sport, Exercise and Active Living, Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia. Electronic address: patrick.mclaughlin@vu.edu.au.
authors.forename: Patrick
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: McLaughlin
authors.affiliation: College of Health and Biomedicine, Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia; Centre for Chronic Disease Prevention and Management, Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia; Institute for Sport, Exercise and Active Living, Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia.
authors.forename: Brett
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Vaughan
authors.affiliation: College of Health and Biomedicine, Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia.
authors.forename: James
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Shanahan
authors.affiliation: College of Health and Biomedicine, Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia.
authors.forename: Jake
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Martin
authors.affiliation: College of Health and Biomedicine, Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia.
authors.forename: Gabriel
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Linger
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D005260:Female; D005528:Foot / Q000033:anatomy & histology* / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D015588:Observer Variation; D010808:Physical Examination / Q000379:methods*; D011403:Pronation / Q000502:physiology*; D012016:Reference Values; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D013484:Supination / Q000502:physiology*
keywords: Evaluation; FPI-6; Novice; Reliability