Body Awareness Rating Scale (BARS) - a study on Reliability and Validity

Project summary

Body Awareness Rating Scale (BARS) is a structured physiotherapeutic assessment tool with roots in Basic Body Awareness Therapy (B BAT). It is made to evaluate the effect of B BAT in relation to people suffering from long lasting pain problems, eating disorders, lifestyle problems etc. The content of BARS is the physiotherapists` observation of movement quality together with the patients` description of the movement experience, lying, sitting, standing, walking and movement in pair. The purpose is to study the inter-rater and the test-retest reliability, internal consistency, to validate BARS in relation to theoretical validity and to see how BARS functions in relation to other health-related tests. The study is a cross sectional and a test-retest study. Two qualified physiotherapists` in BARS, both from the municipal physio-therapy, will do the tests. 50 persons are included: 30 will participate in the reliability study and 50 in the validity study. Half of the informants are recruited from patients` coming to physiotherapy, patients suffering from long-lasting muscle-skeletal problems and mental problems. The other half of the informants is a group of healthy working persons. The informants vary in age (not below 18 year) and sexes. The physiotherapists` use of BARS, General Perceived Self-Efficacy Scale (GPSES) and Short Form-36 Health Survey (SF-36) are to be included in a usual clinical situation. Written informed content is used. Kappa and ICC will be used for analysing the data. The project is accepted by the Regional Committee for Medical Research Ethics and by the Norwegian Social Science Data Services. The study aims at new knowledge concerning the assessment tool Body Awareness Rating Scale (BARS) in a more comprehensive study. This might give indications if BARS can be used in the way it is formed today.