Measuring child social communication across contexts: Similarities and differences across play and snack routines.
A 10-minute home snack gives you BOSCC scores as solid as play-based clips, so you can track social gains without extra clinic gear.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team wanted to know if the Brief Observation of Social Communication Change (BOSCC) still works when kids eat a snack at home instead of playing with toys.
They filmed autistic children during a 10-minute home snack and during play. Trained raters scored the same social items in both clips.
The goal was to see if snack-time ratings stayed reliable and could track change the same way play ratings do.
What they found
Snack-time BOSCC scores were solid. Raters agreed with each other, and the scores lined up well with play-time scores for social communication items.
The tool picked up each child’s social level about as well during snack as during play. Repetitive-behavior items were shakier in both settings.
How this fits with other research
Pijl et al. (2018) first showed the BOSCC could spot change over time, but they only used play sessions. Dudley et al. (2019) now prove you can drop the toys and still get clean data at the kitchen table.
Byrne et al. (2025) tried the BOSCC with fluent speakers and saw no change, hinting that the tool may miss gains in older, verbal kids. Dudley et al. (2019) focused on younger children, so the snack method still looks useful for early-intervention ages.
Faja et al. (2023) compared eight social scales and said ADOS-2 and Vineland-3 stay steady over six weeks. Dudley et al. (2019) add a practical twist: a free 10-minute snack clip can give you stable scores without extra clinic visits.
Why it matters
You no longer need fancy toys or clinic space to run a BOSCC. Film the child eating a snack at home, score it the same way, and you get trustworthy social-communication data. This saves travel time, feels natural to families, and still tracks intervention progress.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Improving measurement of outcomes in randomized controlled trials of early interventions for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has been identified as a priority in the field. In addition, the importance of measurement across contexts has been indicated by researchers and community stakeholders alike [Lord et al., ; McConachie et al., ; Schreibman et al., ]. The Brief Observation of Social Communication Change (BOSCC; Grzadzinski et al., ), an observational rating scheme of brief play interactions, was developed to address a need for measures that are reliable, sensitive to change, and valid for use in research settings. The goal of this study was to examine the feasibility and utility of applying the BOSCC to a new context: a home snack routine. Results suggest that rating the BOSCC on home snack routines is feasible and psychometrically sound, and captures change in child social communication behaviors. However, the utility of the BOSCC for measuring restricted and repetitive behaviors (RRBs) is less clear. Nonetheless, differences in RRBs across play and snack lend support for the claim that measurement across contexts is essential. Application of the BOSCC across contexts may allow researchers to obtain a more accurate estimate of intervention response and help capture context-specific changes in social communication. It may also provide a method for researchers to evaluate the effect of context on child social communication more broadly. Autism Res 2019, 12: 636-644. © 2019 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc. LAY SUMMARY: Improving measurement of outcomes in studies of early interventions for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has been identified as a priority in the field. The importance of measurement across contexts has also been indicated by researchers and community stakeholders. The goal of this study was to determine whether an existing observational rating scheme, the Brief Observation of Social Communication Change (BOSCC), could be applied to a new activity: a home snack routine. Results suggest that rating the BOSCC on home snack routines is feasible and promising for capturing change over time. In addition, some child behaviors differed across play and snack, lending further support for the claim that measurement across activities is essential.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2019 · doi:10.1002/aur.2077