Brief report: "Quick and (not so) dirty" assessment of change in autism: cross-cultural reliability of the Developmental Disabilities CGAS and the OSU autism CGI.
Two-minute autism severity scales stay reliable even in European hands with little autism experience.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Choque Olsson et al. (2014) asked European clinicians to rate autism severity with two short scales.
The scales were the DD-CGAS and the OSU Autism CGI.
Most raters had little experience with autism tools.
What they found
Different clinicians gave similar scores.
The agreement was moderate to good for both tools.
Results matched earlier North American studies.
How this fits with other research
Rudra et al. (2014) also moved Western tools into new cultures. They translated screening forms into Bengali and Hindi and saw the same clear split between kids with and without autism.
Chiang et al. (2013) adapted the STAT for Taiwan toddlers. Like Nora, they kept the tool short and still got solid numbers.
Magaña et al. (2017) tweaked the ADI-R algorithm for Latino families. All four studies show the same lesson: quick autism tools travel well if you adjust them for language and culture.
Why it matters
You can grab the DD-CGAS or OSU Autism CGI and feel safe using them with new team members or foreign partners. A five-minute severity rating now holds up across continents and across rookie clinicians.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
There are few evaluated economic tools to assess change in autism. This study examined the inter-rater reliability of the Developmental Disabilities Children's Global Assessment Scale (DD-CGAS), and the OSU Autism Clinical Global Impression (OSU Autism CGI) in a European setting. Using these scales, 16 clinicians with multidisciplinary background and varying experience independently rated eight vignettes of autism spectrum disorder for severity and general psychosocial functioning at referral and discharge. Intraclass correlation coefficient (ICCs) for experienced clinicians were .75 for the DD-CGAS and .72 for the OSU Autism CGI. In inexperienced clinicians these ICCs were .58 and .59. Results confirm previous North American studies, and further extents the reliability of the instruments to untrained, less experienced clinicians with different professions.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2014 · doi:10.1007/s10803-013-2029-y