Factor analytic study of repetitive behaviours in young children with Pervasive Developmental Disorders.
Repetitive behaviors sort into two reusable profiles—insistence on sameness and sensory-motor—for both autistic and non-autistic developmentally delayed young children.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Parents filled out the ADI-R interview about repetitive behaviors.
The team ran a factor analysis on answers from preschool and early-elementary kids.
Some kids had autism. Others had developmental delay without autism.
What they found
Two clear behavior clusters showed up in both groups.
One cluster is insistence on sameness: rituals, rigid routines, upset by change.
The other is sensory-motor: hand flapping, lining up toys, staring at lights.
How this fits with other research
Richler et al. (2007) saw the same two factors in toddlers.
Matson et al. (2013) later repeated the split in a huge sample of 1,825 kids.
Donahoe et al. (2000) had already shown autistic kids display more of these behaviors than kids with mental retardation alone; the current paper adds that the way behaviors group is the same across diagnoses.
Why it matters
When you screen a young child, score insistence-on-sameness and sensory-motor items separately. A high score in either zone points to needed intervention even if the child does not yet carry an autism label.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The aim of the current study was to investigate the manifestation of repetitive behaviour profiles in young children with a Pervasive Developmental Disorder. The sample consisted of 137 developmentally delayed children with a DSM-IV-TR Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD) and 61 developmentally delayed children without a PDD. An exploratory factor analytic investigation using 12 ADI-R repetitive behaviour items from parent report of children with a PDD reported the emergence of two factors. The first factor consisted of higher-level, "insistence on sameness" behaviours, and the second of lower-level, repetitive "sensory-motor" behaviours. This factor structure was also applicable to a more general group of young children with developmental delay, regardless of their diagnosis. Correlational analyses highlighted contrasting relationships between developmental variables and the different repetitive behaviour factors. These relationships were different for children with a PDD and those without a PDD. The findings have potential implications for the early assessment and diagnosis of PDDs in young children.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2009 · doi:10.1007/s10803-008-0680-5