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PFIC
Definition
The profile of functional impairment in communication (PFIC) was designed to assess communication impairments following traumatic brain injury (TBI; Linscott et al. 1996). It consists of ten summary scales: logical content, general participation, quantity, quality, internal relation, external relation, clarity of expression, social style, subject matter, and aesthetics. Each summary scale is rated on a six-point scale ranging from zero (normal) to five (very severely impaired). The summary scales are not summed. In addition, there are 84 specific behavior items used to direct clinical care and intervention; these items assess the frequency of communication impairments from “not at all” to “almost always/always.”
The PFIC has been used in a few studies to characterize communication problems (Dahlberg et al. 2006) and treatment efficacy (Dahlberg et al. 2007) in individuals with TBI.
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Reliability: Inter-rater reliability correlations are...
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Dahlberg, C., Hawley, L., Morey, C., Newman, J., Cusick, C. P., & Harrison-Felix, C. (2006). Social communication skills in persons with post-acute traumatic brain injury: Three perspectives. Brain Injury, 20, 425–435.
Dahlberg, C. A., Cusick, C. P., Hawley, L. A., Newman, J. K., Morey, C. E., Harrison-Felix, C. L., et al. (2007). Treatment efficacy of social communication skills training after traumatic brain injury: A randomized treatment and deferred treatment controlled trial. Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, 88, 1561–1573.
Linscott, R. J., Knight, R. G., & Godfrey, H. P. D. (1996). The profile of functional impairment in communication (PFIC): A measure of communication impairment for clinical use. Brain Injury, 10, 397–412.
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Bushnik, T. (2018). Profile of Functional Impairment in Communication. In: Kreutzer, J.S., DeLuca, J., Caplan, B. (eds) Encyclopedia of Clinical Neuropsychology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57111-9_1958
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57111-9_1958
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