The Reliability of a Video Analysis Tool to Evaluate Outcomes for Animal Assisted Therapy Involving Dogs in Children and Young People with Autism

AIMS: To determine inter-rater and test-retest reliability of a video analysis tool (VAT-AAT) for evaluating changes in frequency and duration of verbal social behaviors, non-verbal social behaviors, play behaviors, and negative behaviors of children and young people aged 3-25 years with autism during animal-assisted therapy (AAT). METHODS: Following recruitment and training, 23 occupational therapy students from an Australian metropolitan university rated a simple or complex video-recorded AAT session on two occasions. Expert raters determined acceptable score ranges which were compared with collected data from the raters to determine intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC). RESULTS: ICCs were 0.84 (simple session) and 0.89 (complex session) for inter-rater reliability and 0.84 (simple session) and 0.89 (complex session) for test-retest reliability. The percentage agreement was similar across level of session complexity and rater experience with children and autism but was lower for participants with less experience with animals (<10% difference in percentage agreement). CONCLUSIONS: The VAT-AAT has good inter-rater and test-retest reliability when used in AAT with children and young people with autism. Session complexity or rater experience with children or autism did not impact on the level of agreement with expert raters. Validity of the tool now needs to be established.