The Intra-rater Reliability of Nine Content-Validated Technical Skill Assessment Instruments (TSAI) for Athletic Taping Skills.

Abstract

Objective: To establish the intra-rater reliability of nine content-validated Technical Skill Assessment Instruments (TSAI) for the skills of athletic taping. Setting: University of Calgary. Subjects: Canadian Certified Athletic Therapists, CAT(C), with a mean ± SD of 9.6 ± 10.8 years as a CAT(C), 7.8 ± 10.9 years as a Supervisory Athletic Therapist, 8.5 ± 12.0 years teaching athletic taping skills, and 9.2 ± 11.5 years evaluating athletic taping skills. Design: Six Certified Athletic Therapists from Canada completed the repetitive evaluations of nine different athletic taping scenarios. Each rater evaluated the performance of a student therapist taping a standardized patient while using the appropriate TSAI designed for each athletic taping scenario. Evaluations occurred once per month for five successive months. Raters viewed the performances on a portable DVD player at a central testing site. Measurements: The percent scores of 270 completed TSAIs were used for analysis. ICC (3, k) was used to quantify the intra-rater reliability. We used a One-way ANOVA with repeated measures to determine if mean differences across testing months existed within raters. Significance was achieved with α = 0.05. Results: ICC values for the nine TSAIs ranged from 0.65 to 0.95 with Ankle 3 and Thumb 2 achieving the lowest and highest ICC values respectively. One-way ANOVA with repeated measures did not provide significant mean differences between testing months within each rater. Conclusion: The nine TSAIs possess substantial to almost perfect reliability with seven TSAIs appropriate for summative evaluations and two appropriate for formative evaluations.