COMPARISON OF POSTAL VERSION OF THE FRENCHAY ACTIVITIES INDEX WITH INTERVIEWER-ADMINISTERED VERSION FOR USE IN PEOPLE WITH STROKE

Objective: To assess the agreement between postal and interviewer-admi nistered versions of the Frenchay Activities Index (FAI) and to assess the criterion validity of the postal version, using interviewer admin istration as a gold standard. Design: Comparison of responses to FAI a dministered by post and then by interview (median delay 10 days). Subj ects: Forty-eight Oxfordshire residents admitted to hospital with acut e stroke between 1 August 1994 and 31 January 1995 and discharged aliv e within six months of their stroke. Results: The limits of agreement of the total FAI score are from -5.4 to 7.2, The kappa statistic for e ach of the 15 individual items that make up the FAI ranged from 0.35 t o 1. For nine items, agreement was moderate or fair, and for six items , agreement was good or very good. The mean difference between the ove rall scores was 0.9 (95% confidence interval: -0.1 to 1.9). The correl ation between the overall scores was 0.94 (Spearman's rank correlation coefficient). Conclusion: The postal version of the FAI is a satisfac tory alternative to direct administration, but poor agreement in score s for individual patients emphasizes that the two approaches should no t be used sequentially to monitor individual patients.