Development and Preliminary Validation of the Accommodations & Impact Scale for Developmental Disabilities.
The 19-item AISDD gives BCBAs a fast, reliable way to measure and document how much families rearrange life for their child with DD.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team built a new 19-item caregiver form called the AISDD.
Parents rate how often they change routines, skip events, or feel stress because of their child’s needs.
They tested the families of kids with autism, ID, or other delays. Ages ranged from 2 to 18.
What they found
The scale scored high on reliability (α = 0.94).
Scores rose in step with lower child adaptive skills and higher behavior problems.
It cleanly split families into low, medium, and high accommodation groups.
How this fits with other research
Older tools like the DBC (C et al. 2002) and the Adolescent Behavior Checklist (B et al. 1994) track behavior problems, not family impact. The AISDD fills that gap.
The C-SHARP (A et al. 2009) and DABS (Giulia et al. 2014) also introduced fresh scales for DD, but they measure aggression and adaptive skill. AISDD extends the family by targeting caregiver accommodation.
Hirota et al. (2018) found only three ASD screeners with solid replication for age 4+. AISDD is not a screener; it is a needs-assessment tool, so the papers do not clash—they simply serve different clinical moments.
Why it matters
You can hand the AISDD to parents at intake and in five minutes see who needs respite, parent training, or home-based support.
Use the total score to justify extra hours or to show insurance that accommodation drops after treatment.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The lives of caregivers can be deeply impacted by having a child with a developmental disability (DD). To offset those impacts, caregivers may engage in accommodations, or strategies to bolster everyday functioning. The nature and extent of these accommodations can provide insight into how the family is doing and what supports are needed from a family-centered perspective. This paper presents the development and preliminary validation of the Accommodations & Impact Scale for Developmental Disabilities (AISDD). The AISDD is a rating scale that measures day-to-day accommodations and impacts of raising a child with a DD. A sample of 407 caregivers of youth with DDs (Mage = 11.7 years; 63% males) completed the AISDD, along with measures of caregiver strain, daily challenges, child adaptive behavior, and behavior and emotional regulation. The AISDD is a unidimensional, 19-item scale with excellent internal consistency (ordinal alpha = .93) and test-retest (ICC = .95) reliability. Scores were normally distributed and sensitive to age (r = - .19), diagnosis (ASD + ID > ASD > ID), adaptive functioning (r = - .35), and challenging behaviors (r = .57). Finally, the AISDD showed excellent convergent validity with similar measures of accommodations and impacts. These findings support the use of the AISDD as a valid and reliable tool for measuring accommodations among caregivers of individuals with DDs. This measure shows promise in its ability to identify which families may need additional support for their children.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2024 · doi:10.1007/s10826-016-0381-1