Reliability Evaluation of the BIFMA Chair Measurement Device

This paper reports an evaluation of the reliability of the Business and Institutional Furniture Manufacturers Association's (BIFMA) chair measurement device (CMD) for assessing design specifications. Eight participants were trained to use the CMD to measure three typical office chairs. The variations in measurements obtained across participants, across chairs, and across the various chair design specifications were examined statistically. The standard deviations and confidence intervals for the measurements were used to evaluate inter-evaluator reliability (consistency across the different evaluators) and intra-evaluator reliability (consistency within an evaluator). The observed measurement errors were relatively small, indicating that CMD measurements can be made reliable across evaluators, as well as repeatedly by evaluators.