Inter-rater agreement of a modified and extended Swedish version of the Frenchay Activities Index (FAI)

The point of departure for this study was the need for an instrument capturing social activities updated to the living circumstances of the 21st century. Starting out from the Frenchay Activities Index (FAI), the objective was to investigate the inter-rater agreement of the scoring of a modified and extended Swedish version, capturing activity performance and participation. Thirty-one older people, living in the community post stroke, were interviewed in their homes by two raters using the Swedish FAI version, extended with items on use of mode of transport and use of telephone, and modified with additional scales. Besides the original frequency scale, the new scales captured changes in frequency, reasons for change, and performance satisfaction; inter-rater agreement was analyzed with kappa statistics. Overall, the inter-rater agreement was high or very high, with weighted \( \bar{\kappa } \) = 0.924 for the frequency scale and \( \bar{\kappa } \)= 0.784–0.940 for the new scales. As a conclusion, while further validity and reliability testing is necessary, when out-of-home activities are of interest the scoring of the modified and extended Swedish FAI version can be administered with high inter-rater agreement.