This article has been republished here with special permission from Elsevier.

A group of five clinicians from the Dual Diagnosis Program at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Ontario, Canada, ranked the support needs of 50 people with intellectual disabilities as Low, Medium, or High based on written client descriptions that were part of an assessment package for services and then compared the rankings to the scores gleaned from the Supports Intensity Scale (SIS). It was found that groups with clinician-rated Low, Medium, and High Needs had significantly different SIS Support Needs Index scores in six of seven SIS subscale scores. These results suggest that the SIS scores provide valid information regarding the intensity of support needs of individuals with intellectual disability currently receiving services.

The results of this study titled, “Support for the construct validity of the Supports Intensity Scale based on clinician rankings of need” by Jonathan A. Weiss et al. are are published in the September/October 2009 issue of Research in Developmental Disabilities. Click here to read the study.

This is the first study to attempt to examine the predictive capacity of the different SIS domain scores for different rated levels of overall need. The SIS ranks the support needs of a person in 85 different areas and the Scale is divided into 6 different areas including Home Living Activities; Community Living Activities; Lifelong Learning Activities; Employment Activities; Health and Safety Activities; and Social Activities. Of all the standard SIS scores, Home Living Activities was the strongest predictor of clinician-ranked level of need. Individuals who have high scores on this subscale need more intense supports in self-care and home-living activities, such as dressing, hygiene, using appliances and equipment, and preparing and eating food. The current results suggest that individuals who require more frequent and/or intense supports of this kind, and who may by extension have low levels of adaptive behavior in activities of daily living, may be regarded by clinicians as requiring higher levels of support need.

It is important to establish the reliability and validity of any standardized measure. Studies have been ongoing on the validity of the SIS, as it is being increasingly used by state and provincial agencies to make service planning decisions as well as funding decisions. The current article states, “ “The SIS is likely a useful measure to quantify and standardize levels of need, and guide resource allocation, in concert with professional clinical judgment. The ability to plan for appropriate services and recognize individuals who may require more resources is critical if governments are to move to a proactive-based model from a reactive crisis-based model of service provision…By providing the correct level of support, service planners can reduce the probability that individuals will require more expensive services in the future.”

Another recent study to examine the validity of the Supports Intensity Scale includes "Efficacy of the Supports Intensity Scale (SIS) to Predict Extraordinary Support Needs" published in the January 2009 issue of the American Journal on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (AJIDD). Click here to read an article on this study and access full text of the study.

To see a sample SIS form, click here.