Caregiver Perceptions of Social Communication and Interaction: Development and Validation of the SCIPS.
SCIPS is a quick, two-factor caregiver scale that tells you both the frequency and the importance parents place on their child's social-communication skills.
01Research in Context
What this study did
McClain et al. (2025) built a new caregiver form called the SCIPS. It asks how often kids show social skills and how much parents value each skill.
The team gave the draft to a large, mixed group of parents. They ran stats to see if the questions clump into clean themes.
What they found
The scale held together. Two clear factors popped out: basic social use and advanced social use.
Internal consistency was good. The tool promises a quick read of what caregivers see and care about.
How this fits with other research
Kaat et al. (2025) released the 184-item DASCA the same year. Both tools chase caregiver views of social-communication, but DASCA is long and built for tracking growth, while SCIPS is short and adds 'importance' ratings.
Chowdhury et al. (2016) gave us the HSQ-ASD for non-compliance. SCIPS now pairs with it: one captures problem settings, the other captures social skill value.
Balser et al. (2026) will offer the PAUACS acceptance scale. SCIPS completes the picture by shifting the lens from how parents feel about autism to how they rate their child's social performance.
Why it matters
You now have a five-minute caregiver scale that flags which social skills families think matter most. Use SCIPS at intake to pick parent-valued targets, then re-check every six months to show them their child's growth in the places they care about.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Social communication and interaction (SC/I) skill quality may be influenced by cultural values, norms, and expectations. Because difficulties in SC/I is a core criterion for identifying autism and is a frequent construct of interest in autism research, a measure designed to capture cross-cultural differences in the perspectives of SC/I skills is warranted. To address this need we developed and validated the Social Communication and Interaction Perceptions Scale (SCIPS), a caregiver report measure for children ages 6-18 years, that measures both frequency and perceived importance of various SC/I skills. Results from 401 diverse caregiver participants showed that for both domains (i.e., Frequency and Importance) the SCIPS has good reliability (α = 0.88-0.95) and two factors that examine basic and advanced aspects of SC/I skills. Findings support the use of the SCIPS as a measure of caregiver perspectives of SC/I skills in clinical and research contexts.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2025 · doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2006.02.004