The Music Attentiveness Screening Assessment, Revised (MASA-R): A Study of Technical Adequacy

Abstract

Background: Evidence suggests that attention is an important consideration when designing procedural support interventions for children undergoing distressing medical procedures. As such, the extent to which children can attend to musical stimuli used during music-based procedural support interventions would seem important. The Music Attentiveness Screening Assessment (MASA) was designed to assess a child's ability to attend to musical stimuli, but further revisions were deemed necessary to improve administration, test-retest reliability, and interobserver agreement for the measure's items.

Objective: This study investigated the technical adequacy of the Music Attentiveness Screening Assessment, Revised (MASA-R), with a non-clinical sample of children aged 4 to 9 years by examining (a) Construct validity using comparator instruments measuring auditory attention; (b) Test-retest reliability following a two-week delay; and (c) Interobserver agreement when administered by two independent examiners.

Methods: This non-clinical sample included 69 children who were administered both items from MASA-R and two comparator instruments: the Auditory Attention subtest from the NEPSY-II (NII-AA) for children aged 5 to 9 years (n = 47); and the Auditory Attention subtest from the Woodcock-Johnson Tests of Cognitive Abilities, 3rd ed. (WJIII-AA), for children aged 4 years (n = 22).

Results: A significant proportion of score variance was shared by both MASA-R items and the comparator measures: R (2) = .16, F(2, 66) = 6.30, p = .003. MASA-R score estimates with regard to test-retest reliability (Item I, intra-class correlation [ICC] = .88; Item II, ICC = .91) and interobserver agreement (Item I, ICC = .99; Item II, ICC = .98) also fell into acceptable ranges.

Conclusions: Estimates of MASA-R score construct validity, test-retest reliability, and interobserver agreement appear improved over its predecessor, MASA. While findings are promising, additional investigation of its use with a clinical sample is needed before it can be confidently used in pediatrics.

Keywords: attention; music; music therapy; pediatrics; reliability; test development; validity.