Interrater reliability of clinically performed manual arm position and motion matching test

Objective: This study examined the interrater reliability of manually performed arm position and motion matching tests in healthy older adults. Methods: 16 healthy older adults were required to perform 2 tasks (position matching and motion matching) with both arms for 4 target angles with 3 repetitions for each. 4 occupational therapists were recruited to rate the participants’ performance by viewing recorded digital images. Results: Krippendorff’s Alpha values ranged between 0.15~0.33 for the position matching test and 0.02~0.19 for the motion matching test among the 4 raters. Junior therapists showed higher reliability in both tests than senior therapists. Conclusion: Results indicated poor interrater reliability of manually performed arm position and motion matching tests. Time of clinical experience may have potential impact on the reliability coefficient as junior therapists had higher percentage of trials rated as impaired than senior therapists. Junior therapists also had higher Krippendorff’s Alpha values than senior therapists.