The development of an instrument to match individuals with disabilities and service animals

Abstract

Purpose: There has been an increase in the use of service animals assisting persons with disabilities in the past decade. However many of the service dog agencies do not utilize an assessment that is designed to match the person to the animal in the rehabilitation and psycho-social domains. The purpose of this study was to develop the Service Animal Adaptive Intervention Assessment (SAAIA) and to measure the content validity, inter-rater reliability and clinical utility of the assessment.

Method: Two subject groups were used. Subject group one had 43 subjects who measured the content validity and clinical utility of the SAAIA Survey. Subject group two had 12 subjects who measured the inter-rater reliability by completing the SAAIA using information obtained through a video-taped client case scenario.

Results: Content validity results indicated a good to high percentage of agreement and a fair percentage of agreement for clinical utility. Inter-rater reliability results indicate good to high agreement on six of the eight variables of the SAAIA. However, the Kappa score indicates low inter-rater reliability.

Conclusion: Results indicate the SAAIA has good content validity and inter-rater reliability and fair clinical utility based on percent agreement. However, further research is needed on the reliability of the SAAIA.