Communication abilities and work reentry following traumatic brain injury

Abstract

The purpose of this exploratory study was to determine if a single communication measure or combination of measures could discriminate employed from unemployed individuals with traumatic brain injury (TBI). Twenty adult subjects (ten employed and ten unemployed), one to four years post injury, with comparable severity of injury and type of work participated in the study. Each subject was given ten communication tests measuring: auditory processing (Filtered Words, Auditory Figure Ground, Competing Words, and Competing Sentences subtests of the SCAN-A); the effects of speaking under time pressure (FAS and Rapid Automatized Naming); production of oral language (local coherence); language ability (Aphasia Quotient portion of the Western Aphasia Battery); and functional verbal reasoning ability (Scheduling and Planning an Event subtests of the Functional Assessment of Verbal Reasoning (FAVR)). Results revealed that when a combination of three communication tests, the Scheduling subtest of the FAVR, and the Filtered Words and Competing Sentences subtests of the SCAN-A, was used, the model correctly classified 85% of employed and unemployed individuals. The findings suggest that both impairment and disability-based tasks (i.e. those measuring activities that reflect daily communication) may be more revealing than the impairment-level tasks alone that frequently appear in the TBI and work re-entry literature. Impairment and disability level communication tasks may provide functional and practical information, which can be used to assist in work re-entry.