'Picture My Participation': Development and Validation of an App-Based Self-Assessment of Participation and Environmental Factors for School-Age Children with Disabilities

World Health Organization and United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) advocate children’s rights of ‘participation’ in society, emphasizing environmental supports to promote children’s self-expression and participation in all decisions involved them. Participation is defined as involvement in life situations, and has been recognized as ultimate goals for rehabilitation and education of children with disabilities. Research indicated that school-age children with disabilities experience greater participation restrictions and fewer environmental supports than their peers without disabilities. Related research focused on parental report and children’s voices were rarely heard. Taiwan launched the Implementation Act of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (2014) to legalize the implementation of CRC. However, there is a need for specific strategies and tools. Our teams’ research has increased knowledge of participation and environmental needs of children with disabilities in transition to school age. However, the measures we developed are mostly based on parental report; child-report measures are quite limited. Picture My Participation (PMP) is a child self-report tool for children 5-17 years of age with disabilities. The PMP uses pictures and Talking Mats that enable children to identify participation frequencies, participation goals, and environmental supports/barriers to a home, school, and community activities. It was developed by Australian and Swedish researchers in collaboration with United Nations Children's Fund. Our team joined their international project on developing and validating the PMP in different languages and cultures. Given the advances and popularity of mobile technologies, developing the PMP Traditional Chinese version (PMP-C) into App software would provide a fun and user-friendly interface to promote communication and active engagement in the assessment process. The purposes of this study are to: develop an App for the PMP-C and establish reliability and validity, and characterize child-identified participation goals and identify environmental supports and barriers. We propose a three-year research project that involves two phases. Phase I (1st year) aims to design App functions and interfaces. Usability test will involve 15 children (including with and without disabilities) and their main caregivers from diverse family and demographic backgrounds using a user-experience design. Phase II (2nd to 3rd year) aims to establish reliability and validity on an estimated sample of 150 pairs of children with and 150 pairs without disabilities and their main caregivers. Data will be collected by examination and interviews using the PMP-C App and other measures for validation. Children will be guided to tell the most important activities they desire changes, and to analyze facilitators, barriers and possible solutions. The PMP is the only child self-report tool that evaluates participation and environment at the same time. Developing it into App fits the public habits of using mobile devices, and also leads a novel trend of technology development. In practice, guiding children with disabilities to set intervention goals and analyze solutions will be a new experience that empowers children, family, and health professionals. Findings of this study will guide our next step to examine the efficacy of participation-based intervention on promoting child’s participation and self-determination.

Project ID:PC10708-1272
External Project ID:MOST107-2314-B182-048