Development, Validation and Confirmation of an Archetype Tool to Evaluate Prakriti

Introduction: Notion of Prakriti as an indispensable concept in Ayurveda has attained remarkable contemplation now a day’s owing to its generous effect in clinical practice. Assessment of Prakriti finds a way with huge inter and intra-rater variability resulting in ambiguous results. This study aims to develop a reliable Prakriti assessment tool. Materials and Methods: Many classical text books of Ayurveda were scrutinized scrupulously to collect the features of different Prakriti individuals. Features related to different Prakriti were kept in simple form. For statistical verification of newly designed tool; 428 students aged between 18-40 years studying different courses at Banaras Hindu University were registered. For validation; Prakriti assessment results of the newly designed tool was compared with other two beforehand tools functional in the Department of Kriya Sharir, Faculty of Ayurveda, IMS BHU. Observations and Result: A Prakriti evaluation tool was designed which had 43, 36 and 42 features of Vata, Pitta and Kapha Prakriti individuals in a very undemanding form. Reliability test result in the form of Cronbach’s coefficient Alpha was found to be 69, 77 and 81 respectively for Vata, Pitta and Kapha. It shows that the newly designed tool is fairly consistent. Cohen kappa coefficient value for tool pairs is 0.51 and 0.57 that corroborate validity of new tool. Conclusion: Results show that newly designed Prakriti assessment tool amalgamates the basic construction of different Prakritis that can be catered with objective precision in a reproducible outcome manner.