Occupational changes during the COVID-19 lockdown in Jordan.

BACKGROUND: Measures to limit the spread of COVID-19 have disrupted the lives of countless millions of individuals worldwide. OBJECTIVE: To explore the experiences of occupational disruption and changing social roles among Jordanians during COVID-19 lockdown in 2020. The specific aim was to explore the changing occupations, routines, roles and coping strategies. MATERIAL AND METHODS: This qualitative study used a digital ethnographic approach. Data collection included online observations of Jordanian's posts of comments, photos and videos on six public Facebook pages during the COVID-19 lockdown for the initial 3-week period. In addition, 150 Jordanians participated in an online interview answering four open-ended questions to achieve triangulation. Qualitative analyses included open coding of the photos, videos and text as well as the interviews independently and blindly by the research team. RESULTS: Four themes were identified: changing daily occupations; changing family roles; missing pre-lockdown life and coping strategies under lockdown. CONCLUSION: The COVID-19 lockdown restrictions caused direct, significant and immediate changes to Jordanians' occupations, routines and roles; enforcing new obligatory occupations and eliminating desired ones. SIGNIFICANCE: Knowledge from this study highlight the kinds of strategies and supports during and after lockdowns that need to be considered in future planning of occupational therapy practice in Jordan.

The Psychometric Properties of the Arabic Preschool Activity Card Sort.

BACKGROUND: The Preschool Activity Card Sort (PACS) is an interview-based assessment tool to measure participation of preschool children with age range from 3 to 6 years. OBJECTIVE OF STUDY: The purpose of this study was to establish the psychometric properties of the recently translated Arabic PACS (A-PACS). METHODS: One hundred fifty-one Jordanian parents participated in the study representing different geographical areas. Children were almost equally distributed between males and females and into three age groups. Construct and concurrent validity were examined as well as the internal consistency of the scale and the test-retest reliability. FINDINGS: The A-PACS was able to differentiate between the participation level of young and old children in the domains of education, community mobility, and low demand leisure of the A-PACS giving evidence to its construct validity and it significantly correlated with some aspects of the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scale (VABS) giving evidence to its concurrent validity. The A-PACS showed excellent overall internal consistency (α = .859) for all domains and good test-retest reliability (r = .976, p < .001). CONCLUSION: The A-PACS can be considered as a valid and reliable tool to measure participation of preschool children with normal development from Arabic cultures. Future studies should focus on the validity of the A-PACS for use with children with disabilities.