A Longitudinal Examination of Autism Services, Child Adaptive Functioning, and Parent Quality of Life during the COVID-19 Pandemic.
Switching from ABAS-2 to ABAS-3 can inflate adaptive scores—adjust your clinical interpretation accordingly.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Anbar et al. (2026) followed children with mixed diagnoses through the COVID-19 pandemic.
They compared ABAS-2 and ABAS-3 scores to see if the newer test gives different results.
Parents filled out both editions during routine re-evaluations.
What they found
ABAS-3 scores came out higher than ABAS-2 scores on every key scale.
The gap was biggest in the Practical area.
Only moderate agreement between the two versions means a child could look more capable just by switching forms.
How this fits with other research
Sutton et al. (2022) saw adaptive skills crash in Italian young adults when COVID closed services. Joshua’s work shows the tool itself can also inflate scores, so real losses might be masked.
Lugo-Marín et al. (2021) found some autistic youth actually improved mentally during lockdown. Together these papers reveal a messy picture: some kids gained, some lost, and the yardstick changed length.
Pandolfi et al. (2021) warn that Vineland-3 domain scores mislead clinicians; Joshua adds the same warning for ABAS edition swaps.
Why it matters
If you retest a child this year, know that higher ABAS-3 numbers do not always mean real growth. Check the form edition in old reports before writing goals or recommending less support. When you see a jump, ask: is it the kid, or is it the test?
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Join Free →Open last year’s report, note which ABAS edition was used, and subtract about five standard-score points from the old totals before comparing to this year’s ABAS-3 results.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
BACKGROUND: Adaptive functioning is an important area of assessment with implications for differential diagnosis, educational placement, service eligibility and criminal sentencing. While periodic normative and content updates of adaptive functioning measures are necessary to keep measures relevant, knowledge of equivalence between versions is also required if adaptive measures are to be used to track the stability of adaptive functioning skills over time. METHOD: This paper presents two studies that used between-group and within-group comparison designs to examine the equivalence of the second and third editions of the Adaptive Behavior Assessment System (ABAS) in a mixed clinical sample. In study 1, ABAS-2 scores for children assessed between 2014 and 2015 (n = 1036; mean age = 10.24, SD = 3.44) were compared with ABAS-3 scores for children assessed between 2015 and 2016 (n = 1291; mean age = 10.51, SD = 3.70). Study 2 examined a separate sample of clinically referred children (n = 572) for whom parent ratings had been obtained on both the ABAS-2 (mean age = 9.65, SD = 2.80) and ABAS-3 (mean age = 13.33, SD = 2.95) in the course of repeated assessment. RESULTS: For Study 1, while no intelligence quotient score differences were observed between the ABAS-2 group (mean Verbal Comprehension Index = 93.67, SD = 16.95) and the ABAS-3 group (mean Verbal Comprehension Index = 93.08, SD = 17.42), ABAS-2 scores were lower than ABAS-3 scores on the Conceptual, Practical, and General Adaptive Composite scales. In study 2, a similar pattern was observed (ABAS-2 < ABAS-3 on the Conceptual, Practical, and General Adaptive Composite scales), and concordance correlation coefficients ranged from 0.54 [0.49, 0.58] (Practical composite) to 0.68 [0.64, 0.72] (Conceptual composite). The Practical composite had the lowest concordance correlation coefficient value and the largest mean score difference between ABAS versions. CONCLUSIONS: The ABAS-3 scores may be higher than ABAS-2 scores in clinical populations. Knowledge of these potential discrepancies will be critical when interpreting standard score changes across ABAS versions in the course of clinical, educational and forensic assessments.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2026 · doi:10.1111/jir.12810