Criação de protocolo de avaliação do equilíbrio corporal em crianças de quatro, seis e oito anos de idade: uma perspectiva funcional

Abstract

Creation of a Balance Assessment Protocol of Balance for Four, Six and Eight-Year-Old Children: A Functional Perspective Objective: To create a body balance test within a functional context and verify its adequacy and applicability among a group of Brazilian children. Method: The participants were 66 children with typical motor development and chronological ages of four, six and eight years old, who were selected at three schools with middle-class intake. Each age group was composed of 22 children (11 girls and 11 boys). The test protocol was composed of eight tasks distributed in two circuits. All the tasks were scored by quantitative and qualitative criteria. The quantitative criteria were based on the time taken and the number of steps/jumps correctly performed in the corresponding items. The qualitative assessment was scored on a four-point ordinal scale, based on action verbs. Results: The intraclass correlations between examiners and the test-retest reliability were satisfactory. To compare the performance between the three age groups, the Kruskal-Wallis test was utilized, and to locate the differences between groups, the Mann-Whitney U test was used. There were significant differences in performance between the four and eight-year-old children in the tasks, both for qualitative and quantitative criteria. Differences in performance between the four and six-yearold children were also observed for some of the tasks assessed. Most of the differences between the six and eight-year-old children in the balance tasks examined were not significant. Conclusion: The assessment tool has potential for clinical use. Future studies should verify the clinical utility of the protocol among children presenting delayed motor development.