Biomedical subjects

Julia Harries

Publications and source records attributed to Julia Harries.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed2006

Construct and criterion validities of the Service Need Assessment Profile (SNAP): a measure of support for people with disabilities.

BACKGROUND: The Service Need Assessment Profile (SNAP) measures individual functional needs in areas of daily living. It produces a support profile, detailing the time allocations for staff support to assist in each area of need. The Supports Intensity Scale (SIS) is a support needs assessment scale designed to provide an objective measure of a person's need for support in medical, behavioural, and life activities. SIS can be used for individualised support planning, clinical judgements regarding support needs, resource allocation and financial planning. The Inventory for Client and Agency Planning (ICAP) assesses adaptive and maladaptive behaviours and gathers additional information to determine type and amount of special assistance that people with disabilities need. METHOD: This study evaluated the construct and criterion validities of SNAP in relation to the SIS and ICAP, using assessment data from 114 individuals with a range of disabilities and levels of severity. RESULTS: Construct and criterion validities were supported for the SNAP by high correlations with SIS, ICAP, and staff estimates of support needs and by its capacity to discriminate between sub-groups in expected ways. CONCLUSIONS: The results provide support for the use of SNAP as a support needs instrument.

Activities of Daily Living↗

PubMed2006

Rater bias and the measurement of support needs.

BACKGROUND: The development and use of support need instruments for funding disability services is a relatively recent initiative. Although the use of these measures appears at face value to provide an objective measure of support needs, little is known about their psychometric properties, particularly with respect to rater bias and purpose of assessment. A measure of support that has been developed in Australia to provide estimates of service needs and associated funding is the Service Need Assessment Profile (SNAP). METHOD: This study investigated whether SNAP scores obtained for different assessment purposes - research and funding - are affected by rater bias, by comparing SNAP to 3 other measures of support from 29 people with intellectual disabilities. RESULTS: We found that SNAP scores completed for funding purposes showed an individual's support needs to be much greater than comparison scores on both SNAP and the 3 other measures obtained for research purposes. CONCLUSIONS: Our results suggest that support measures such as SNAP may significantly overestimate support needs when raters know the assessment is being used for funding purposes.

Activities of Daily Living↗

PubMed2005

Support needs and adaptive behaviors.

We used a prepublication version of the Supports Intensity Scale (SIS), the Adaptive Behavior Scale-Residential and Community, and the Inventory for Client and Agency Planning to examine the relationship between support needs and adaptive behavior for 80 people with intellectual disabilities. Dimensionality of the SIS Support Needs Scale (Section 1) was examined in reference to the three areas of conceptual, social, and practical skills reported by the American Association on Mental Retardation as comprising the adaptive behavior construct. Factor analysis of the adaptive behavior subscales and SIS Support Need Scale offered support for measurement of a common underlying construct. When considered in terms of the three adaptive behavior skill areas, this construct related predominantly to conceptual skills.

Adaptation, Psychological↗