Researchers Yael Lavie-Pitaro, Naomi Weintraub, and Anat Golos of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem developed and tested the Adolescents Participation Questionnaire, or APQ, a self-report instrument aimed at young people aged 14 to 18. The tool is grounded in the definition of participation as involvement in a life situation, a concept central to the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Functioning, Disability, and Health. Participation, in this framework, is shaped by intrinsic factors such as body structure and function and by extrinsic factors such as the settings of home, school, and community. Crucially, it is also a multidimensional construct. The objective dimension concerns how often a person attends or engages in an activity. The subjective dimension encompasses the feelings, experiences, and perceptions surrounding that engagement, including personal satisfaction, perceived importance, sense of belonging, and meaningfulness, the extent to which an activity aligns with personal values and contributes to a sense of purpose.

The APQ operationalises these ideas through four scales applied to each of 28 activities: six In-school items, such as active participation in recess and involvement in learning activities, and 22 Out-of-school items spanning home and community contexts, from house chores and volunteering to driving lessons and, notably, dating and romantic activity, an item suggested by the student panel itself. The Frequency scale asks how often an adolescent performs each activity, the Choice scale probes whether the main reason is internal desire or external necessity, and the Importance and Satisfaction scales gauge the personal value and fulfilment attached to participation. The emphasis on choice draws on self-determination theory, which positions autonomy as a key driver of intrinsic motivation, engagement, and well-being. When individuals feel in control of their decisions, they tend to experience greater satisfaction and persistence in daily activities, making the distinction between choosing and being required to participate a psychologically meaningful one.

The study unfolded in two stages. The first focused on developing the initial Hebrew-language version of the questionnaire and establishing its content validity. The researchers assembled two expert panels of ten participants each: one composed of educators and occupational therapists with at least eight years of experience working with adolescents, and the other of high-school students in grades 10 through 12, the very population the tool targets. Both panels received the initial 28-item version with items in random order, along with a specification table asking them to rate each activity’s relevance to adolescent everyday life, its typical context, and the suitability of the scales and their rating formats. Open-ended questions invited further recommendations.

The content validity results were strong. Item-level content validity indices ranged from acceptable to excellent among the professional experts, from 0.70 to 1.00, while the student experts’ indices ranged from 0.50 to 1.00. Scale-level indices were excellent for the Out-of-school activities and for the entire questionnaire among both panels, and acceptable to excellent for In-school activities. The multi-rater linear weighted kappa statistic, which adjusts for chance agreement, was good for In-school items and excellent for Out-of-school items and the full questionnaire. Both panels showed 100 percent agreement on the classification of each activity to its original context, and more than 80 percent agreement on the appropriateness of each scale and its ratings. Based on the panels’ feedback, the team rephrased some items, broadened the student council item into a general Participation in School Activities item, trimmed the Likert scales from five to four points for clarity, and converted the Choice scale to a dichotomous format distinguishing internal choice from external necessity.

The second stage examined the revised questionnaire’s reliability and construct validity in a comparative cross-sectional design. A convenience sample of 379 typically achieving students aged 14 to 18, drawn from eight general-education high schools in grades 9 through 11, completed the APQ during school hours in roughly 30 minutes, anonymously and independently. To test known-groups validity, the researchers added a comparison group of 103 underachieving students attending alternative schools designated for those who had dropped out or been expelled from general education due to underachievement and behavioural challenges. A subset of 22 students repeated the questionnaire two weeks later to establish test-retest stability. The study received approval from the Hebrew University’s institutional research board and Israel’s Ministry of Education.

The psychometric findings were encouraging. Internal consistency, assessed on the Frequency scale because students were instructed to skip the other scales for activities they never performed, was acceptable for the entire questionnaire at an alpha of 0.75, and for the Out-of-school context at 0.69, with the smaller In-school context at 0.61, still within an acceptable range. Test-retest reliability across scales and contexts ranged from medium to excellent, with intraclass correlation coefficients between 0.42 and 0.92, indicating good stability over time. The dichotomous Choice scale could not be tested with the ICC method, and the authors flag this, along with the weaker In-school Importance results, as priorities for further research.

The construct validity comparisons yielded findings that are intriguing in their own right. Girls attributed significantly more importance to both In-school and Out-of-school activities and participated more frequently in Out-of-school activities than boys, yet boys reported significantly more choice in their Out-of-school participation. The researchers suggest that although boys may engage in fewer out-of-school activities, the personal initiative behind those choices boosts their sense of autonomy. Comparing achievement groups, typically achieving students participated more frequently in In-school activities and rated them as more important, consistent with prior evidence that underachieving students show diminished classroom engagement. Yet the underachieving students reported significantly more choice in both contexts, and showed no significant differences in the subjective Importance and Satisfaction of Out-of-school activities. One plausible explanation lies in the character of alternative schools, which often employ experiential learning, student-centred curricula, one-to-one teacher relationships, and less hierarchical structures, all of which may enhance students’ sense of agency. Effect sizes were generally small, though medium effects emerged for the Choice scale in the achievement comparison and for the Importance of Out-of-school activities in the gender comparison.

The authors are careful about the study’s limits. The sample covered grades 9 through 11 only, data relied solely on student self-report, and reliability estimation was computed only for the Frequency scale. They recommend extending the work to a wider age range, incorporating the perspectives of parents and educational staff, testing convergent validity against other instruments, comparing students with disabilities to their typical peers, and estimating reliability across all scales. Even so, the APQ meets the initial psychometric criteria for content validity, reliability, test-retest stability, and construct validity, and it fills a genuine void. Existing tools such as the Children’s Assessment of Participation and Enjoyment, the Participation and Environment Measure for Children and Youth, and the Child and Adolescent Scale of Participation were designed for broader age ranges and lack activities representative of adolescent life, such as paid work, driving, and romantic relationships. By capturing both how often teenagers act and how much those actions matter to them, the APQ offers clinicians, educators, and researchers a way to detect imbalances between objective engagement and subjective meaning, and to build interventions that treat participation not merely as attendance, but as a foundation of adolescent identity, motivation, and quality of life.

Subject of Research: Development and psychometric validation of a questionnaire assessing objective and subjective dimensions of adolescent participation in daily activities

Article Title: Adolescent participation characteristics: Development and initial psychometric properties of the adolescents participation questionnaire

Article References: Lavie-Pitaro, Y., Weintraub, N., & Golos, A. (2025). Adolescent participation characteristics: Development and initial psychometric properties of the adolescents participation questionnaire. Scandinavian Journal of Occupational Therapy, 32(1), Article 2487467. https://doi.org/10.1080/11038128.2025.2487467

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1080/11038128.2025.2487467

Keywords: adolescence, participation, questionnaire development, psychometrics, content validity, reliability, construct validity, self-determination theory, occupational therapy, well-being, school engagement, underachievement