Discriminative validity of the Danish version of the Pediatric Evaluation of Disability Inventory (PEDI)

The Pediatric Evaluation of Disability Inventory (PEDI) assesses functional status in children with disabilities aged 0.5-7.5 years. The purpose of this study was to examine if the Danish version of the PEDI was able to discriminate between nondisabled children and children with cerebral palsy (CP) or juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA). Convenience sampling was used to select the clinical samples that consisted of 22 children with CP and 14 children with JIA aged 1.5-7.5 years. An additional sample, consisting of 224 nondisabled children aged 1.0-5.9 years, was obtained on the basis of random sampling. The PEDI was administered as a questionnaire completed by the parents. Results from receiver operating characteristics (ROC) analysis showed that in the case of discrimination between children with CP and nondisabled children, the sensitivity and specificity were 77.3 and 97.8%, respectively. In the discrimination between children with JIA and nondisabled children, the sensitivity and specificity were 99.8 and 81.7%, respectively. Study results indicate that the Danish version of the PEDI shows good discriminative validity. Further studies of the discriminative validity are recommended.