Initial Development and Evaluation of the My Family's Accessibility and Community Engagement (MyFACE) Tool for Families of Children With Disabilities

Abstract

Importance: Parental perceptions and experiences of community inclusion influence the community participation of families and children with a disability, although no measurement tools exist.

Objective: To describe the initial development of the My Family's Accessibility and Community Engagement (MyFACE) tool.

Design: MyFACE measures parental perceptions of community accessibility and engagement of families raising a child with a disability. Items represent common community activities rated on a 5-point Likert scale. COnsensus-based Standards for the selection of health Measurement INstruments (COSMIN) guided content validity, construct validity, and internal reliability testing.

Setting: Australia.

Participants: Seventy-seven mothers of children with a disability provided data, with 69 complete data sets.

Results: The nine-item MyFACE had excellent content and construct validity and good internal reliability (Cronbach's α = .85). Hypothesis testing correlated MyFACE with maternal factors (mental health and healthy behavior) and child factors (psychosocial issues). Three predictors together explained 27% of the variance in a significant model, F(3, 61) = 7.09, p < .001. The most important predictor was maternal depressive symptoms.

Conclusions and relevance: Initial evaluation of the MyFACE tool suggests sound psychometric properties warranting further development. What This Article Adds: The MyFACE tool provides clinicians and researchers with a way to measure parental perceptions of community inclusion. Maternal depressive symptoms were predictive of MyFACE scores, indicating that to be effective, family participation may require clinicians to address maternal mental health and children's participation restrictions.