Development and psychometric evaluation of an instrument for measuring social participation in young persons

• Applicants: Professorin Dr. Britta Dawal; Professor Dr. Matthias Richter, since 7/2020
• Subject Area: Public Health, Healthcare Research, Social and Occupational Medicine
• Term: from 2018 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 404636197

Social participation is an important component in the development of young persons because it influences social experience, social-emotional development, and competence experience. The importance of social participation has been established within the framework of socio-political developments of the last decades and has prevailed in the field of rehabilitation processes. Social participation is the social perspective of health and functional capability in the ICF-CY and it is also a central aspect in the "Gesetz zur Stärkung der Teilhabe und Selbstbestimmung von Menschen mit Behinderungen". It is recommended to regard social participation as a main goal of rehabilitation and support measures.However, there is no well-founded assessment instrument for collecting and evaluating social participation in young personsavailable in Germany.The aim of this project is to develop, test, pilot, and evaluate psychometrically a social participation assessment instrument for young persons between 12 and 17 years.In a sequential mixed-method study, young persons with and without physical impairments will be interviewed in semi-structured discussions. They will be asked about their experiences and their satisfaction with social participation as well as their individual opinion about the importance of self-determination. The perspective of the young persons will be supplemented by focus groups that will be conducted on the one hand with experts from the social pediatric care and on the other hand with parents. These different perspectives will provide the greatest possible gain in knowledge for the development of the instrument. The current international findings will be integrated as well. On the basis of the results of the first step of the study, a social participation instrument will be developed. The target group of young persons as well as the experts will evaluate the instrument in terms of content. The assessment instrument will be implemented in social pediatric centers as well as in rehabilitation clinics, and a pilot study will be conducted and evaluated psychometrically.This study provides meaningful data about the social participation of young persons, which make it possible to describe the theoretical construct. The relevance of social participation for the life of young persons as well as the goal planning in rehabilitative processes is also included. Further, social participation as one of the core target provided by the legislator can be evaluated in individual measures. The developed instrument can be utilized in science to identify disadvantaged groups and the possible disadvantages for the individual development of young persons. Furthermore, it helps to compensate these disadvantages, by specific interventions. In practice, the instrument can be used to determine the goals of rehabilitation together with the young person, and to evaluate the achievement of the goal.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Ehemalige Antragstellerin: Dr. Astrid Fink, until 6/2020