Ceiling effects in the Movement Assessment Battery for Children-2 (MABC-2) suggest that non-parametric scoring methods are required

French, Blandine; Sycamore, Nicole J.; McGlashan, Hannah L.; Blanchard, Caroline C.V.; Holmes, Nicholas P.

Abstract

Initially designed to identify children's movement impairments in clinical settings, the Movement Assessment Battery for Children-2 (MABC-2) is also widely used to evaluate children's movement in research. Standardised scores on the test are calculated using parametric methods under the assumption of normally-distributed data. In a pilot study with thirty five 8-10 year old children (i.e., in Age Band 2 of the MABC-2), we found that maximal performance was often reached. These ‘ceiling effects’ created distributions of scores that may violate parametric assumptions. Tests of normality, skew, and goodness-of-fit revealed this violation, most clearly on three of the eight sub-tests. A strong deviation from normality was again observed in a sample of 161 children (8-10 years, Experiment 1), however ceiling effects were reduced by modifying the scoring methods, and administering items designed for older children when maximal performance was reached. Experiment 2 (n=81, 7-10 years) further refined the administration and scoring methods, and again improved the distributions of scores. Despite reducing ceiling effects, scores remained non-parametrically distributed, justifying non-parametric analytic approaches. By randomly and repeatedly resampling from the raw data, we generated non-parametric reference distributions for assigning percentiles to each child's performance, and compared the results with the standardised scores. Distributions of scores obtained with both parametric and non-parametric methods were skewed, and the methods resulted in different rankings of the same data. Overall, we demonstrate that some MABC-2 item scores are not normally-distributed, and violate parametric assumptions. Changes in administering and scoring may partially address these issues. We propose that resampling or other non-parametric methods are required to create new reference distributions to which an individual child's performance can be referred. The modifications we propose are preliminary, but the implication is that a new standardisation is required to deal with the non-parametric data acquired with the MABC-2 performance test.

Citation

French, B., Sycamore, N. J., McGlashan, H. L., Blanchard, C. C., & Holmes, N. P. (in press). Ceiling effects in the Movement Assessment Battery for Children-2 (MABC-2) suggest that non-parametric scoring methods are required. PLoS ONE, 13(6), Article e0198426. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0198426

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: May 25, 2018
• Online Publication Date: Jun 1, 2018
• Deposit Date: May 29, 2018
• Publicly Available Date: Jun 1, 2018
• Journal: PLoS ONE
• Electronic ISSN: 1932-6203
• Publisher: Public Library of Science
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 13
• Issue: 6
• Article Number: e0198426
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0198426
• Keywords: Methods, movement, children, nonparametric, assessment
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/935297
• Publisher URL: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0198426
• Contract Date: May 29, 2018