Abstract:
When assessing an individual for autism spectrum disorder (ASD), clinicians often use multiple measures in order to get a complete picture of the individual’s functioning. Many studies have investigated the value of multiple informants, and how much additional information is gained by using multiple reports. As such, this practice has become an important part of a comprehensive ASD assessment. When assessing a child for ASD, most clinicians seek out both parent and teacher reports, however the variance in settings among raters often results in report discrepancies (Duvekot, van der Ende, Verhulst & Greaves-Lord, 2015). Although studies have examined the correlations and discrepancies between parent- and teacher-reported scores in various assessments used in ASD evaluations, many factors that may influence the relations between parent and teacher reports have not been examined. The current study investigated the extent to which parent education, children’s ASD symptom severity, and children’s adaptive functioning individually weakened or strengthened the relation between parent and teacher report of social skills deficits. Furthermore, the study assessed whether these relations varied differently when parent- and clinician-reported symptoms and specific ASD symptom subdomains and adaptive functioning subdomains were examined independently. Finally, exploratory analyses were conducted to assess whether these relations varied according to diagnostic group (ASD or non-ASD) or geographic classification (rural county or urban county). The tested hypotheses were generally unsupported, and the proposed moderators were not significant.
