Tuesday 18th December

Hi Will,

We met today to begin understanding our plan for the second stage of your research: to link each question of each assessment to the ICF.  You explained to me the ICF chapters under the headings of Body Functions, Body Structures, Activities and Participation, and Environmental Factors, then we discussed each of the four levels involved in the linking.  After this we went through the current linkage rules and looked at examples of how each rule would be applied in different situations.  From this, we were able to practice linking statements or questions from assessments to the ICF, and found the we are quite consistent with each other, and whilst we differed from the authors of the linkage rules slightly, we were still reasonably similar in our answers to them.  I found that I understand the concept of linking every statement/question, but that it is much more difficult and complex than I initially believed.  I need to read each statement/question very carefully so that I pick up every meaningful word, as it may be linked to a number of different chapters depending on the words included.  It is also sometimes difficult to identify which code is the most specific, or if it should be the higher code instead.  But the session today was definitely very beneficial in enhancing my understanding of what we will be doing next year.

At the end of today I also went through the LIFE-H statements/questions that we had for the shorter version and made a few changes so that they are exactly the same as the ones from the original assessment.

Our plan for tomorrow is to continue practicing linking statements/questions to the ICF, and to discuss our timetable for next year.  I will be in around 9:30am.

Kelly