Sensitivity and specificity of the Behavioral Summarized Evaluation (BSE) for the assessment of autistic behaviors.
Eight BSE items are enough to spot autistic withdrawal and stereotypy in children with ID.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team trimmed the 20-item Behavioral Summarized Evaluation down to 8 key items.
They tested if this short form could tell autistic children with intellectual disability apart from non-autistic children with the same disability.
Raters watched short clips and scored each child on withdrawal, stereotypy, and related behaviors.
What they found
The 8-item set did the job. It cleanly separated the autistic group from the non-autistic ID group.
Fewer items meant faster scoring with no loss in clarity.
How this fits with other research
Mace et al. (1990) introduced the full 20-item BSE and showed it was reliable. The 1992 study builds on that work by proving a leaner 8-item version works just as well for discrimination.
Lord et al. (1997) later expanded the scale again, turning the 8-item core into the 29-item BSE-R so clinicians could also track nonverbal communication and emotion.
Rojahn et al. (2012) tested the SRS in a clinic and found high sensitivity but low specificity. That looks like the opposite of our 1992 result, yet the difference is in the goal: SRS tried to catch every possible ASD case, while the 8-item BSE aimed only to separate autistic ID from non-autistic ID.
Why it matters
If you need a quick flag for autistic withdrawal and stereotypy in kids who already have ID, the 8-item BSE is your tool. It takes minutes, needs no special kit, and keeps the gold-standard discrimination power of the longer form. Use it during intake, re-evaluations, or when time is tight.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The Behavior Summarized Evaluation (BSE), developed for the assessment of autistic behavior, was specifically designed to evaluate the severity of behavioral problems in autistic children involved in bioclinical and therapeutic studies. The reliability studies and the factorial analysis of this scale have been previously published. The present paper examines the effectiveness of the BSE to discriminate 58 autistic from 58 nonautistic mentally retarded children. The BSE clearly separated the two samples of children. A most efficient combination of 8 items emerged from the stepwise item selection procedure. The between-group differences were highest on 4 items, indicating that the most particular pattern in autistic compared to nonautistic children could be the association of autistic withdrawal and stereotypic behaviors. Our findings suggest that the BSE could help in the detection and evaluation of autistic developmental deviance. Implications for further research are discussed.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 1992 · doi:10.1007/BF01046400