Reproducibility between preschool and school-age Social Responsiveness Scale forms in the Environmental influences on Child Health Outcomes program.
SRS scores hold steady from preschool to school age, but watch for bigger swings in high-risk or later-diagnosed children.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team checked if SRS scores stay the same when kids move from the preschool form to the school-age form.
They looked at hundreds of children taking part in a big national study.
Parents filled out the SRS twice: once when the child was around four, and again near age seven.
What they found
Ninety-two percent of the children kept the same SRS risk level across the two forms.
Kids with an autistic brother or sister, and kids who were later diagnosed with autism, showed more score jumps.
Still, most scores only moved a few points, not enough to change the risk group.
How this fits with other research
Barthelemy et al. (1989) saw the same steady pattern with IQ scores in autistic preschoolers followed for five years.
Their work tells us that using the same test brand, and waiting until at least age four, gives the most stable numbers.
Wieckowski et al. (2024) just built a new screener for the same 4- to 8-year window, showing the field wants tools that grow with the child.
Together, the papers say: pick one good tool, stick with it, and expect a little more wobble in high-risk or later-diagnosed kids.
Why it matters
You can trust SRS T-scores to stay put as kids age, so one baseline is often enough.
If the child has an autistic sibling or is still waiting on a diagnosis, re-test and look for real changes.
This saves you from extra forms and keeps treatment decisions clear.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Evidence suggests core autism trait consistency in older children, but development of these traits is variable in early childhood. The Social Responsiveness Scale (SRS) measures autism-related traits and broader autism phenotype, with two age-dependent forms in childhood (preschool, 2.5-4.5 years; school age, 4-18 years). Score consistency has been observed within forms, though reliability across forms has not been evaluated. Using data from the Environmental Influences on Child Health Outcomes (ECHO) program (n = 853), preschool, and school-age SRS scores were collected via maternal report when children were an average of 3.0 and 5.8 years, respectively. We compared reproducibility of SRS total scores (T-scores) and agreement above a clinically meaningful cutoff (T-scores ≥ 60) and examined predictors of discordance in cutoff scores across forms. Participant scores across forms were similar (mean difference: 3.3 points; standard deviation: 7), though preschool scores were on average lower than school-age scores. Most children (88%) were classified below the cutoff on both forms, and overall concordance was high (92%). However, discordance was higher in cohorts following younger siblings of autistic children (16%). Proportions of children with an autism diagnoses were also higher among those with discordant scores (27%) than among those with concordant scores (4%). Our findings indicate SRS scores are broadly reproducible across preschool and school-age forms, particularly for capturing broader, nonclinical traits, but also suggest that greater variability of autism-related traits in preschool-age children may reduce reliability with later school-age scores for those in the clinical range.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2024 · doi:10.1007/s12264-017-0114-5