Development of a community life engagement fidelity scale to assess and improve day services and supports

BACKGROUND: Despite an increase in supported employment, a large and growing number people with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) still participate in non-work day services. Quality day services that lead to community life engagement (CLE) play an important role in both leading to and complementing competitive integrated employment. OBJECTIVE: Building off guideposts developed in previous research, we aimed to develop and test a new instrument, the CLE Fidelity Scale, for service providers to assess whether their day services and supports are well-designed to support CLE. METHODS: The research involved four steps: item generation based on existing instruments, a self-advocate review panel and Delphi panel for content adequacy assessment, piloting the instrument with service providers, and internal consistency assessment and factor analysis of the pilot data. RESULTS: The end product of these four activities was an 18-item CLEFS that loaded onto three components. The CLEFS also displayed strong content validity (CVR over 0.5 for all items) and interrater reliability (average α=.837), CONCLUSION: The CLEFS can be a useful tool for service providers and state agencies seeking to assess and improve day services and supports.