The Occupational Performance History Interview: Evidence for Three Underlying Constructs of Occupational Adaptation

The Occupational Performance History Interview (OPHI) was developed to gather data on a person's past and current occupational functioning. The OPHI includes both a life history narrative component designed to render the life history from the client's perspective and a rating scale designed to measure the client's past and present occupational adaptation. Previous research documented the reliability of the OPHI, but there has been limited study of its construct validity. This study used Rasch analysis to determine the construct validity of a modified version of OPHI scale (OPHI-R). Data previously gathered on 20 clients in a psychiatric setting were analyzed. The results indicate that the items of the OPHI-R do not effectively measure a single construct of occupational adaptation as originally thought. Rather, the OPHI-R items appear to measure three underlying constructs reflecting occupational competence, identity and environment. These findings suggest that revision of the OPHI scale should seek to capture these three underlying constructs for the measurement of occupational adaptation.