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This article describes the development and reliability testing of the Role Checklist, a two-part written inventory designed to identify past, present, and future roles and the degree to which individuals value each role. Roles included provide expectations and/or opportunities for occupational behavior, such as student, worker, volunteer, caregiver, home maintainer, friend, family member, religious participant, hobbyist/amateur, and participant in organizations. To assess reliability, we administered the checklist twice to a group of 124 normal volunteers ranging in age from 18 to 79. Values obtained for kappa and weighted kappa, measures of agreement that correct for chance agreement, suggested moderate or better agreement for Parts 1 and 2 of the checklist. We concluded, therefore, that the checklist has satisfactory test/retest reliability.
Key Words: occupational roles * reliability * evaluation
Within the occupational behavior tradition, roles have been stressed as critical determinants of productivity (Heard, 1977; Matsutsuyu, 1971; Moorhead, 1969; Reilly, 1969; Versluys, 1980). Theorists have argued that roles help to organize productive behavior by providing a personal identity, conveying social expectations for performance, organizing use of time, and placing the individual within the social structure. They have further suggested that occupational therapy's unique view of disability involves understanding how illness or injury affects occupational performance and how successful adaptation after illness or injury depends on one's ability to resume competent role responsibilities (Black, 1976; Matsutsuyu, 1971; Reilly, 1969; Rogers, 1982; Shannon, 1972; Versluys, 1980).
Several approaches to gathering data on roles have been developed (Black, 1976;Florey&MicheIman, 1982; Heard, 1977; Moorhead, 1969), which employ either a lengthy assessment battery or interviews of varying length. Empirical assessments of the reliability and validity of these methods have not been reported in the literature. These approaches focus exclusively on occupational roles; however, such a focus may be too limiting for complete assessment of how roles serve to organize occupational behavior.
The Role Checklist is a written assessment aimed at obtaining reliable and valid information about several types of roles in which people engage in occupational behavior. The instrument provides data on individual perception of participation in roles throughout the lifespan and on the degree to which each role is valued. We turn now to a discussion of the process of development and empirical examination of the Role Checklist, originally...