Using the brief observation of social communication change (BOSCC) to measure autism-specific development.
The BOSCC is a brief, reliable video scale that shows true autism-symptom change over time.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team filmed short play sessions with preschoolers who have autism.
Two coders then rated each video with the new BOSCC checklist.
They repeated the filming one year later to see if scores changed.
What they found
Autistic symptoms dropped by a medium amount over the year.
Different raters gave almost the same score, so the tool is reliable.
The BOSCC caught changes that older tests often miss.
How this fits with other research
Grzadzinski et al. (2016) ran a twin study the same year and got the same good numbers.
Byrne et al. (2022) later stretched the BOSCC to kids with phrase speech up to age eight.
MacFarland et al. (2025) then moved the coding online and still matched manual scores.
Together the four papers show the BOSCC keeps working as kids grow and as tech changes.
Why it matters
You now have a quick, trusted way to show parents real progress.
Film a ten-minute play sample, code it with BOSCC, and track change every three months.
No extra kits, no long checklists, just your phone and free ratings.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
To date no reliable and objective, change sensitive instrument for autistic symptoms is available. The brief observation of social communication change (BOSCC) was specifically developed to measure change of core autistic symptoms, for example, for use as outcome measure in early intervention trials. This study investigated quality criteria of a preliminary research version of the BOSCC in N = 21 children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) who had participated for 1 year in the Frankfurt early intervention program (FFIP). BOSCC rating was done on play based ADOS video scenes. Inter-rater agreement on the BOSCC average total was very high. The BOSCC showed a significant decrease of autistic symptoms after 1 year with a medium effect size. Symptom specific improvements were captured by the social communication subscale and most single items. The BOSCC showed comparable change sensitivity to other autism specific instruments. Future studies should focus on the finalized BOSCC version, and replicate findings in a larger sample. Autism Res 2016, 9: 940-950. © 2015 International Society for Autism Research, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2016 · doi:10.1002/aur.1588