Using the Child Behavior Checklist and the Teacher's Report Form for identification of children with autism spectrum disorders.
A 10-item CBCL/TRF scale safely rules out autism 95 % of the time and flags kids who need deeper testing.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team pulled 10 items from the Child Behavior Checklist and Teacher Report Form.
They tested if these 10 questions could spot autism in two groups: the kids from the general public and the kids already referred to clinics.
Parents and teachers each filled out their forms. The researchers then checked which children truly had autism using full gold-standard tests.
What they found
The short scale worked like a good bouncer at a club.
It let 95 % of kids without autism pass through, so very few were wrongly held back.
It also caught 73 % of the kids who did have autism, giving a clear signal to look closer.
How this fits with other research
De Kegel et al. (2016) says the opposite: the full CBCL is too noisy and flags too many kids. The difference is that Pety used only 10 targeted items, not the whole long form.
Eggleston et al. (2018) warns that teacher reports alone miss over a third of cases. Pety solved this by blending parent and teacher answers, not trusting just one side.
Lavi et al. (2023) picks up the baton with a new 30-item parent tool for older kids, showing the field keeps building shorter, sharper screens.
Why it matters
You can add these 10 CBCL/TRF items to your intake packet today. If a child scores low, you can feel safe moving on. If the score is high, move them up the wait-list for a full autism evaluation. It saves time and cuts down false alarms.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
This study evaluated the ability of the Child Behavior Checklist and the Teacher's Report Form to identify children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD), using a sample of children with ASD (n = 458), referred children without ASD (n = 1109) and children from the general population (n = 999). A ten items ASD scale was constructed using half of the sample and the ability of this scale to discriminate between children with ASD and the other children was tested for the CBCL and the TRF separately and together in the other half of the sample. Using a cut-off score of 8 the combined CBCL/TRF ASD scale demonstrated high predictive values (NPV 95%, PPV 73%) in identifying children with ASD and children in the general population sample. This might be an acceptable percentage of false positives in general screening, considering the chance that these children might have other behavioural, emotional, and developmental problems which also need psychiatric evaluation. In the referred population, using a cut-off of 13, PPV was 49% and NPV was 85%. The high NPV indicates that in a referred population the scale is especially good at identifying children who do not need evaluation with a more ASD-specific instrument.
Autism : the international journal of research and practice, 2013 · doi:10.1177/1362361312448855