Parental report of social behaviors in autistic preschoolers.

Parents filled out a 22-item checklist about their preschoolers' social habits. The study compared kids with autism to kids with mental retardation only.

Researchers wanted to see which social behaviors show up differently in the two groups.

Autistic preschoolers scored lower on three key areas: pretending, playing with peers, and copying others. These gaps showed up even when both groups had similar IQ scores.

The checklist cleanly separated the two diagnoses.

Later work kept the same parent-report idea but swapped in newer tools. Wang et al. (2011) and Rogers et al. (2017) found the SSRS and SRS-P also work for preschoolers, yet they warn those tools may miss small day-to-day gains.

Grzadzinski et al. (2016) took the next step. They built the BOSCC, a five-minute video code, because parent checklists alone cannot catch tiny improvements during treatment.

Together the papers form a chain: PSBC shows what to measure, later tools refine how to measure it, and BOSCC adds a way to see change.

Add the 22-item PSBC to your intake packet. It takes parents five minutes and gives you three autism-specific flags you can target in therapy. Pair it with a video code like BOSCC if you need to track small steps during intervention.