ABSTRACT

Objective : The purpose of this study was to determine the reliability and validity of the third version of Spinal Cord Independence Measure (SCIM) in patients with spinal cord lesions.Methods : Thirty one subjects (26 males, 5 female) with spinal cord injury participated in this study. To de-termine inter-rater reliability, the relationship between the SCIM III scores obtained by two raters was eval-uated by Kappa coefficient and in total agreement. Concurrent validity was examined by correlating the SCIM III scores to the Functional Independence Measure (FIM) scores.Results : Total agreement between raters was above 67% and the agreement of 16 items was 80% or greater among 19 items. In most SCIM III tasks, the Kappa coefficients range from .62 to 1.00. The Pearson prod-uct-moment correlation coefficients between FIM and SCIM III by two raters were .972 and .975.Conclusion : We conclude that the inter-rater reliability and concurrent validity of the SCIM III used for evaluating the activities of the daily living of the patients with spinal cord injury were high. And the appli-cation of the SCIM III will be possible nationally in the future if afterwards the test-retest reliability, and the difficulty of an item and conformance of the scale are established.