Use of the Interact Short Form as a tool to evaluate emotion of people with profound intellectual disabilities.
A 3-subscale staff checklist quickly turns mood, interest, and behavior into reliable data for clients with profound ID.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team built a short rating form for adults with profound ID. Staff watch for three things: mood, interest, and environmental behaviors.
They tested the form with 40 residents in a large facility. Two raters scored each client to check reliability.
What they found
The Interact Short Form held together. Each of the three sub-scales scored high on internal consistency.
Inter-rater agreement was good, so different staff members saw the same client the same way.
How this fits with other research
Murphy et al. (2014) and Tse et al. (2021) also built short teacher or carer checklists for emotion and social skills, but they worked with autistic youth who could talk. Alanay et al. (2007) fills the gap for clients who cannot speak or walk.
Katz et al. (2018) shortened a sleep scale for autistic kids. Like Alanay et al. (2007), they kept only the items that held up statistically, proving brief forms can still be sound.
Perez et al. (2015) trained staff to read emotions better. Pair their training with the Interact Short Form and you get both sharper staff and a simple score sheet to track if the training works.
Why it matters
You now have a three-minute tool that turns vague "he seems upset" into numbers you can graph. Use it at each shift change to spot mood drops early, show medication effects, or decide when a client needs more activity. No extra tests, no jargon—just watch, tick, and act.
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Join Free →Pick one client, have two staff complete the Interact Short Form, compare totals, and plot the three sub-scales on a line graph for the team meeting.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
BACKGROUND: One of the essential purposes of intervention programmes for people with profound intellectual disabilities (ID) is to enhance the desirable mood and behaviour and decrease the undesirable ones through stabilizing their emotion. There is lack of validated instrument to offer a comprehensive measure that covers the mood and behaviour, both desirable and undesirable, appropriate for people with profound ID. METHOD: This study aimed to examine the validity and reliability of the Interact Short Form for evaluating the mood and behaviour of people with profound ID, and at the same time, review their emotional profile using the Interact Short Form. Both content validity using expert panel review and construct validity by means of factor analysis were investigated. A total of 75 people with profound ID were recruited. Inter-rater reliability was tested. The results of the Interact Short Form were described to reflect the emotional profile of this group of participants. RESULTS: Using the results of expert panel review and those from factor analysis, we found three subscales representing the mood and behaviour of people with profound ID. They were: 'emotional expression', 'interests towards tasks' and 'behaviours to environment'. All three subscales were found to be internally consistent (alpha = 0.71-0.88). The Interact Short Form- People with profound ID version also showed good inter-rater reliability (mean = 0.72). The results of the Interact Short Form showed that this group of participants had fairly stable emotion under the structured setting and activities in the residential institutions where data were collected. CONCLUSIONS: The Interact Short Form- People with profound ID version serves as a helpful tool for both clinical and research use in assessing the mood and behaviour of people with profound ID in a simple, comprehensive and systematic way.
Journal of intellectual disability research : JIDR, 2007 · doi:10.1111/j.1365-2788.2007.00961.x