Who reports it best? A comparison between parent-report, self-report, and the real life social behaviors of adults with Williams syndrome.
For adults with Williams syndrome, parent-report predicts real-world social approach more accurately than self-report questionnaires.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Schroeder et al. (2014) watched the adults with Williams syndrome in real cafés, stores, and buses.
They counted how often each person walked up and talked to strangers.
The team also gave each adult a social questionnaire and asked parents the same questions.
What they found
Self-ratings looked reliable on paper but did not match the real outings.
Parent ratings disagreed with the adults’ own answers yet lined up with the live tallies of actual approaches.
How this fits with other research
Cary et al. (2024) saw the opposite pattern in autistic youth: the kids’ own answers added new information beyond parent reports.
The difference is age and diagnosis—youth with autism can self-advocate, while adults with Williams syndrome may over-rate their friendliness.
Walley et al. (2005) also found words and actions don’t line up in people with intellectual disability; real-life probes beat story questions for both groups.
Cohen et al. (2018) add that parents spot early signs better than short clinician visits, backing the idea that parents often give the closest picture of daily social life.
Why it matters
If you write goals for adults with Williams syndrome, trust parent or caregiver input more than client questionnaires. Pair short community probes with parent logs to track true social approach. This small shift keeps treatment decisions grounded in what really happens outside the clinic.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Given the reliance on self-report in studies of adults with intellectual disabilities, this study examined individual vs. parental reports concerning the social approach behaviors of adults with Williams syndrome (WS) across a hypothetical and a live behavioral setting. Individuals with WS (N = 30) were asked whether they would approach strangers in two hypothetical, laboratory tasks (yes/no questionnaire vs. judging facial stimuli of individuals with different emotional expressions). Similarly, their parents also responded to a rating scale of their child's social approach behavior toward strangers displaying various emotions. Then, in a community setting, behavioral coders recorded actual social approaches of individuals with WS toward strangers. Although self-report ratings were consistent across measures, these measures did not correspond to the individuals' actual behaviors during the community observations. Conversely, parental reports did not correspond to their child's self-report measures, but parents did more accurately predict their child's real-life social approach behaviors. Implications are discussed for both research and practice.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2014 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2014.08.011