Assessment of Autistic Traits in Children Aged 2 to 4½ Years With the Preschool Version of the Social Responsiveness Scale (SRS-P): Findings from Japan.
The preschool SRS reliably captures autistic traits as early as age 2, giving you a parent-friendly ruler for social behavior.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Rogers et al. (2017) checked if the 65-item Social Responsiveness Scale-Preschool works in Japan. They gave the parent form to the toddlers ½. About half had autism, the rest had other delays or were typical.
Parents rated how often the child did each social behavior. The team then looked at test-retest, internal consistency, and how well scores split ASD from non-ASD kids.
What they found
The SRS-P showed strong reliability and clearly separated the ASD group from the others. Scores rose smoothly with more autistic traits, so even subtle social slips were caught.
Girls and boys scored alike, and age did not skew results. In short, the tool behaves the same way in Japanese preschoolers as it does in Western samples.
How this fits with other research
Leung et al. (2011) built a shorter 21-item SSI screener that also flags ASD in preschoolers. The SRS-P gives you more detail, but the SSI is faster when you just need a red-flag check.
Levin et al. (2014) warned that parent SRS scores don’t always line up with ADOS severity. Andrew’s study agrees the scales measure different angles—parent report versus live observation—so low agreement is expected, not a flaw.
Tajik-Parvinchi et al. (2023) later showed the ACSF:SC works from . Their work extends Andrew’s by giving you a second parent tool that spans well past preschool, letting you track the same child for years.
Why it matters
You now have proof that the SRS-P is solid for 2- to 4½-year-olds across cultures. Use it to spot sub-threshold social issues early, write specific goals, and show parents measurable progress over time.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The recent development and use of autism measures for the general population has led to a growing body of evidence which suggests that autistic traits are distributed along a continuum. However, as most existing autism measures were designed for use in children older than age 4, to date, little is known about the autistic continuum in children younger than age 4. As autistic symptoms are evident in the first few years, to address this research gap, the current study tested the preschool version of the Social Responsiveness Scale (SRS-P) in children aged 2 to 4½ years in clinical (N = 74, average age 40 months, 26-51 months) and community settings (N = 357, average age 39 months, 25-50 months) in Japan. Using information obtained from different raters (mothers, other caregivers, and teachers) it was found that the scale demonstrated a good degree of internal consistency, inter-rater reliability and test-retest reliability, and a satisfactory degree of convergent validity for the clinical sample when compared with scores from diagnostic "gold standard" autism measures. Receiver operating characteristic analyses and the group comparisons also showed that the SRS-P total score discriminated well between children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and those without ASD. Importantly, this scale could identify autistic symptoms or traits distributed continually across the child population at this age irrespective of the presence of an ASD diagnosis. These findings suggest that the SRS-P might be a sensitive instrument for case identification including subthreshold ASD, as well as a potentially useful research tool for exploring ASD endophenotypes. Autism Res 2017, 10: 852-865. © 2017 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2017 · doi:10.1002/aur.1742