The Communication DEALL Developmental Checklist - Inter Rater Reliability

Abstract

A checklist is ideal when assessing young children who are ‘difficult to test’. The Communication DEALL Developmental Checklist (CDDC) was developed by Karanth (1), to assess developmental skills of children up to the age of 6 years, along eight developmental domains, with norms based on an Indian population. Since all checklists depend on rater reliability, the aim of the current study was to establish inter rater reliability of the CDDC. Two senior Speech Language Pathologists used a 4-point rating scale, to assess 40 children with developmental disabilities (across the ages of 0-6 years) on the CDDC checklist. Each rater independently made two ratings during the assessment; the first as reported by the parent (PR1 and PR2), and the second based on the clinician’s own observation (CR1 and CR2). The correlation between CR1 and CR2, as well as PR1 and PR2 for each rater separately, was found to be high, suggesting that the CDDC provides a reliable baseline for the developmental skills of children up to 6 years.