Parental Acceptance and Understanding of Autistic Children (PAUACS) - an Instrument Development Study.
The PAUACS gives BCBAs a 30-item parent scale that reliably tracks four kinds of acceptance toward autistic children.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team built a new parent scale called PAUACS. It has 30 short items.
Parents rate how well they accept and understand their autistic child.
The study checked if the scale gives steady answers over time and across four themes.
What they found
The scale showed strong reliability. Parents answered the same way two weeks later.
Four clear factors emerged: warmth, knowledge, advocacy, and stigma.
Early tests show the tool measures what it claims to measure.
How this fits with other research
Magiati et al. (2017) and Jitlina et al. (2017) also built parent scales for autism. They studied anxiety, not acceptance. All three teams found clean total scores but mixed sub-scores.
Tde Wit et al. (2024) and Whitehouse et al. (2014) made brief caregiver tools that track change. PAUACS joins this club: 30 items, parent voice, ready for re-checks after support programs.
Green et al. (2020) trimmed the French PSI-SF to 21 stress items. PAUACS flips the view: it asks about parent growth, not parent strain.
Why it matters
You now have a quick way to see how parents feel about their child’s autism. Use the PAUACS at intake and again after parent training. Rising scores can show your teaching is building warmth and advocacy.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Currently there are no instruments designed to assess parents' acceptance and understanding of their autistic child. We aimed to develop and evaluate the reliability and validity of a parent-report scale assessing parents' acceptance and understanding of their autistic child - the Parental Acceptance and Understanding of Autistic Children Scale (PAUACS). A total of 158 parents (74 non-autistic, 42 autistic, 42 questioning; mean age 42.69 years) of autistic children (mean age 10.80 years) completed an online survey comprising the prototype PAUACS as well as validated measures of parental sensitivity, neurodiversity affirming attitudes, autistic traits, mental health, and child adjustment and family experience. A subsample of participants (n = 97; 61.4%) completed the PAUACS questionnaire a second time, 2 weeks later, to assess for test-retest reliability. The final 30-item scale demonstrated excellent internal reliability (α = 0.89) and test-retest reliability (intraclass correlation = 0.92). Exploratory factor analysis revealed a clean structure comprising four distinct factors: Understanding (α = 0.86), Innate (α = 0.74), Acceptance (α = 0.82), and Expectations (α = 0.73). Overall, the PAUACS demonstrates good construct validity. Preliminary evidence of convergent validity and divergent validity was demonstrated. Preliminary evidence suggests PAUACS is a reliable and valid tool in assessing parents' acceptance and understanding of autistic children.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2026 · doi:10.1007/s11013-015-9441-z