Parent and teacher agreement in the assessment of pervasive developmental disorders.
Parent stress pumps up autism symptom scores—always grab both parent and teacher ratings and read disagreements as clues, not errors.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Szatmari et al. (1994) asked parents and teachers to rate the same preschoolers with autism. They used two checklists: the VABS for daily living skills and the ABC for autism traits. The team wanted to see if the adults agreed and whether parent stress colored the scores.
What they found
Parents and teachers matched on adaptive skills, but not on autism symptoms. Stressed parents marked more autism red flags than teachers did. The gap warns us that stress can inflate parent reports.
How this fits with other research
Lopata et al. (2016) saw the same pattern on the BASC-2 DSD: parents again scored higher than teachers. Greene et al. (2019) flipped the direction for adaptive behavior; with the ABAS-3, teachers now scored higher than parents. Muller et al. (2022) added a twist: parents with more autism-like traits themselves over-rated symptoms, showing the stress effect is specific, not just general worry. Together the papers say: expect a gap, know who is doing the rating, and never trust one informant alone.
Why it matters
Before you write a report or start an intervention, collect both parent and teacher forms. If the scores clash, look at parent stress, BAP traits, and the measure used. Use the gap as data, not noise, to build a fuller picture of the child.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Although it is well known that informants often disagree about the degree of psychopathology in children, this issue has not been systematically evaluated in children with autism. The objective of this paper is to estimate the extent of agreement between parents and teachers on the assessment of autistic symptoms and adaptive behavior skills. We assessed 83 children, 4-6 years of age, with a diagnosis of pervasive developmental disorder (PDD), using the Autism Behavior Checklist (ABC) and the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales (VABS). Parents and teachers rated each child on each measure. While there was good agreement between informants on the VABS, teachers tended to rate the PDD children higher than parents. In contrast, there was virtually no agreement on the ABC. High levels of stress experienced by parents appeared to be associated with parents reporting more autistic behaviors and less adaptive skills than teachers. As with other child psychiatric disorders, caution must be exercised in combining information from several informants.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 1994 · doi:10.1007/BF02172281