Abstract
Background
Assessment of Children’s Hand Skills (ACHS) and Children’s Hand‐Skills Ability Questionnaire (CHSQ) are interconnected hand skills assessment tools that together contain parent questionnaire and observational assessment. With this quality, ACHS and CHSQ enable the therapist to obtain information about the child’s real‐life performances as well as to conduct a clinical observational assessment. The purpose of this study was to investigate the validity and reliability of the Turkish versions of ACHS and CHSQ in children with hemiplegic cerebral palsy (HCP).
Methods
A total of 112 children with HCP between 2 and 12 years of age were included. All participants were subjected to ACHS, CHSQ, Shriners Hospital Upper Extremity Evaluation (SHUEE) and ABILHAND‐Kids. Convergent construct validity was investigated through analysing the relationship between ACHS and SHUEE and between CHSQ and ABILHAND‐Kids. Discriminative construct validity was investigated through analysing the differences between genders for CHSQ and ACHS. For reliability, test–retest interclass correlation coefficient (ICC) and internal consistency Cronbach’s alpha were calculated and analysed.
Results
ACHS showed very strong relationships with SHUEE’s spontaneous functional analysis (r = 0.86) and grip–release function (r = 0.86) parameters with a strong relationship with positional dynamic analysis (r = 0.78). CHSQ’s leisure (r = 0.80), school/education (r = 0.75) and activities of daily living (r = 0.76) domains showed strong relationships with the ABILHAND‐Kids. There was no difference between genders for ACHS and all domains of CHSQ (p > 0.05). All domains and total score of ACHS and CHSQ had perfect test–retest reliability (ICC > 0.90). ACHS had perfect internal consistency (Cronbach’s α = 0.98); CHSQ had very high internal consistency (Cronbach’s α = 0.84).
Conclusions
The Turkish versions of ACHS (ACHS‐TR) and CHSQ (CHSQ‐TR) are valid and reliable hand skills assessment tools in children with HCP.