Activity Card Sort measurement properties - Brazil: the evaluation of elderly participation in activities

Introduction: The Activity Card Sort (ACS) is a standardized assessment tool, adapted to Brazilian culture, which evaluates the participation of older adults in instrumental, social, and leisure activities. Objective: To evaluate the measurement properties of the Activity Card Sort-Brazil (ACS-Brazil) community-living version (form C). Method: Internal consistency and concurrent, convergent and discriminative validity were evaluated. To determine internal consistency, Cronbach's Alpha coefficient was used. Concurrent validity was determined by comparing the ACS-Brazil scores with the LIFE-H 3.1 instrument. Convergent validity was compared with the SF-36 and MMSE-2 assessment instruments, using Spearman's Correlation. The discriminative validity of the ACS-Brazil was assessed using the Mann-Whitney U test, comparing different age groups and years of study. Results: Evaluations for analysis of measurement properties were applied to 65 elderly people living in the community. The measure showed excellent internal consistency (alpha=0.91); strong and positive correlation between the total scores of ACS-Brazil and LIFE-H 3.1 (r=0.442, p < 0.01), and moderate to strong correlation between ACS Brazil and SF-36, in the domain of physical aspects (r=0.509, p<0.01) and vitality (r=0.518, p<0.01) and pain (r=0.409, p=0.01), except for general health and emotional aspects. The results also show that the ACS-Brazil is valid for discriminating between age groups and education. Conclusion: The ACS-Brazil, community-living version (form C), presented satisfactory psychometric properties, with values consistent with the original version and those from other countries. This indicates its clinical usefulness in application in elderly people to measure participation and engagement in daily activities.