Brief Report: The Preliminary Psychometric Properties of the Social Communication Checklist

• Published in: Journal of autism and developmental disorders Vol. 47; no. 4; pp. 1231 - 1238
• Main Authors: Wainer, Allison L., Berger, Natalie I., Ingersoll, Brooke R.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Springer US 01.04.2017; Springer; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Autism; Autism Spectrum Disorder - psychology; Autism Spectrum Disorder - therapy; Autism Spectrum Disorders; Behavior; Behavioral Science and Psychology; Brief interventions; Brief Report; Care and treatment; Check Lists; Checklist - statistics & numerical data; Checklists; Child; Child & adolescent psychiatry; Child and School Psychology; Child, Preschool; Children; Communication; Communication Disorders; Data Analysis; Development and progression; Early Intervention; Early Intervention (Education); Female; Health aspects; Humans; Infant; Interpersonal Communication; Interrater Reliability; Intervention; Language; Language Impairments; Male; Methods; Neurosciences; Outcome Assessment (Health Care) - statistics & numerical data; Pediatrics; Pervasive Developmental Disorders; Psychology; Psychometrics; Public Health; Quantitative psychology; Reliability; Reproducibility of Results; Research methodology; Skills; Social Adjustment; Social interactions; Speech Therapy; Studies; Test-Retest reliability; Validity; Young Children; Florida; New York; United States > US; Social communication checklist; Social communication; Autism spectrum disorder
• ISSN: 0162-3257; 1573-3432
• DOI: 10.1007/s10803-016-3026-8

Despite the expansion of early intervention approaches for young children with ASD, investigators have struggled to identify measures capable of assessing social communication change in response to these interventions. Addressing recent calls for efficient, sensitive, and reliable social communication measures, the current paper outlines the refinement and validation of the Social Communication Checklist (SCC). We discuss two small studies exploring the psychometric properties of the SCC and the SCC-R (revised Social Communication Checklist), including sensitivity to change, inter-rater reliability, and test-retest reliability, in two samples of children with ASD and one sample of typically-developing children. Results indicate this measure is reliable, sensitive to change after a brief social communication intervention, and strongly related to well-established measures of social communicative functioning.