Summary The involvement of service users with acquired communication impairments (e.g. aphasia after a stroke) in schemes which aim to support their long-term community participation has been feature of service provision by the NHS, universities and charities over the last few years. One such scheme is Conversation Partners, which involves visits to people with aphasia by volunteers or students, usually over a period of six months. The evidence base – in terms of the impact of these schemes on service user experience or outcomes such as social participation and engagement for example – is still relatively weak. One reason for this is that there are no validated instruments to evaluate and assess those experiences and impacts.
This study aims to finalise development and complete the process of producing a theoretically motivated and accessible survey instrument to evaluate the experiences of people with aphasia involved in conversation partner schemes.
Well-established questionnaire design & development methods have been used to: i) create questionnaire items; ii) pilot and refine the items. Methods include: a structured review of the literature; individual and group discussions with people with aphasia; and a process of testing the acceptability of survey items (i.e. the questions) by asking people with aphasia to examine a draft version of the questionnaire – so-called ‘cognitive interviewing’.
Ethical permission to carry out this study was granted by the UEA Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences Research Ethics Committee (ref: 2009/10-003)
In the period funded by the TTA, we will:
1. Complete cognitive interviewing process: carry out eight additional cognitive interviews, recording data on a standardised report form
2. Analyse data from these cognitive interviews together with data from the eight existing interviews (sixteen cognitive interviews in total)
3. Produce a pilot questionnaire ready for evaluation
4. Pilot the questionnaire with conversation partner scheme participants: questionnaires will be posted or completed face-to-face
5. Analyse completed data to examine the psychometric properties of the questionnaire, including acceptability, factor structure and convergent validity
6. Produce a revised version ready for wider testing / clinical use |
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