Visual impairments affecting residents of nursing homes can arise from numerous causes, and they can directly affect these residents’ quality of life by jeopardizing their ability to participate in daily activities such as reading, watching television, or even interacting with others. The physical makeup of the nursing home itself can work to either help or hinder its residents, and in cases in which the environment is beneficial, the nursing home can be called an “environmental fit.” This is a term developed by the World Health Organization in its International Classification of Functioning (ICF) framework of environmental factors. In a previous study, the Environmental Observation tool for the Visually Impaired (EOVI-63) was developed to make caregivers aware of how certain lighting conditions could be negatively affecting nursing home residents. It has yet to be seen how the EOVI-63 can contribute to creating an environmental fit for nursing home residents.
To validate the effectiveness of a novel environmental observation tool for visually impaired individuals so that the tool may be used in practice.
The authors employ the Content Validity Index (CVI) to judge the adequacy of EOVI-63. EOVI-63 is a 63-item questionnaire organized into the categories of 1) light, 2) color and contrast, and 3) furnishing and obstacles. The questionnaire judges all of these items within the contexts of common rooms (25 items), corridors (23 items), and bathrooms (15 items). The authors use two ways to determine the CVI score: the proportion of relevant items based on the number of agreements per item (I-CVI) and the Scale Universal Agreement as the number of items that are deemed relevant by all experts (S-SCU-UA). Eight experts (six eyecare experts and two designers) were asked to judge the relevance of all items on the EOVI-63 on a 4-point scale. This helped calculate the I-CVI. The S-CVI-UA was then calculated for the subscales of the corridors, common room, and bathroom categories.
CVI scores generally indicated that all eight experts agreed that the content contained within the EOVI-63 was valid. However, 11 items from the original list of 63 were deemed “not relevant,” resulting in the creation of the EOVI-52. The experts collectively agreed that this slightly abbreviated version of the questionnaire is more relevant to the nursing home setting, getting rid of seemingly superfluous items like, “The floors are light in color,” and “The house number and name plate are easily legible.”
The authors noted that the content validity of only the Dutch version of the EOVI-63 was assessed in this study, so these findings may not apply to the EOVI-63 in general. A small group of experts were used to appraise the checklist without any of field research, comparisons, or examples, so the data from this study relies largely on educated opinion.