IN-HOME OCCUPATIONAL PERFORMANCE EVALUATION (I-HOPE)

The In-Home Occupational Performance Evaluation (I-HOPE) is an assessment developed to target activities performed in the home that are essential for aging in place whereby a multistep procedure establishes current activity patterns, identifies activities that are difficult but important to the older adult, and identifies the environmental barriers that influence specific activities (Stark, Somerville, & Morris, 2010). It does this by inventorying current and desired activity patterns using photographic images as visual cues that the client views as activity cards. Content for the cards are considered activities that occur naturally in the home and during assessment they serve as a visual cue to recall current and previous participation in those activities and include such items as carrying items, getting in or out of bed, opening jars, talking on the phone, reading/writing, washing and drying clothes, getting dressed, opening or closing doors, getting in or out of the car, preparing a meal, and ironing clothes. During assessment the activity cards are viewed and sorted by the client into four categories of occupational performance: (1) I do not do and don’t want to do; (2) I do now with no problem; (3) I do now with difficulty; and (4) I do not do but would like to do (Stark et al., 2010). The result is that activities that are important, difficult, or impossible to perform within the client’s current context are able to be identified and prioritized. The unique scoring system is also able to determine the magnitude of the environment’s influence on those performance activities deemed important. The I-HOPE includes 44 stimulus cards and can be completed in less than 30 minutes. A revised version by Keglovits, Somerville, and Stark (2015) combines 8 new activities as well as the removal of several activities to create a final card sort deck of 43 activities. The revised version uses a similar but more complex scoring system in which data produces the same four sub-scores relative to activity participation, performance, satisfaction, and severity of environmental barriers.