Does the Brief Observation of Social Communication Change help moving forward in measuring change in early autism intervention studies?

Pijl et al. (2018) tested a new 12-minute rating tool called the Brief Observation of Social Communication Change (BOSCC).

They watched toddlers with autism during play and scored tiny shifts in eye contact, gestures, and shared enjoyment.

The team compared these BOSCC scores to the well-known ADOS to see which caught small gains better.

BOSCC ratings stayed steady when two coders scored the same video, showing good reliability.

The tool picked up small individual improvements that the ADOS missed, hinting it may be more sensitive to change.

Still, it did not clearly outrun the ADOS overall, so both remain options.

Byrne et al. (2025) later built BOSCC-F1/F2 for verbally fluent clients of any age, extending the toddler work yet finding no change over their study period. The different result is likely because their sample was older and their intervention was brief.

Dudley et al. (2019) showed you can score the same BOSCC during a home snack instead of play, keeping reliability. This widens where you can use the tool without extra training.

Faja et al. (2023) compared eight social-communication scales and found all, including ADOS-2, stable over six weeks. Their head-to-head approach mirrors the 2018 goal of finding the most sensitive measure.

If you need to show families or funders that subtle social gains are real, add the BOSCC to your toolkit. It takes only ten extra minutes, works in play or snack, and may capture progress the ADOS overlooks. Try filming baseline and post-intervention sessions, then score BOSCC social items alongside your usual ADOS codes to see if it tells the clearer story.