Profiles and Correlates of Parent-Child Agreement on Social Anxiety Symptoms in Youth with Autism Spectrum Disorder.
When autistic youth and parents agree on social-anxiety levels, the youth usually show stronger adaptive skills and milder autism traits.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team asked 8- to 14-year-old kids with autism and their parents to fill out the same social-anxiety checklist.
They wanted to see how closely the two reports matched and what that match meant for daily life skills.
What they found
Most youth said they were more socially anxious than their parents thought.
When the two scores did line up, the child usually had stronger daily-living skills and fewer lifetime autism traits.
How this fits with other research
Lerner et al. (2012) saw the same pattern with social-skills ratings: parents scored their kids about one standard deviation lower than the kids scored themselves.
Kalinyak et al. (2025) took it further by watching kids during real conversations and found that questionnaire scores did not always match live anxiety cues, so adding an observer code can give a fuller picture.
Ozsivadjian et al. (2014) showed that autistic youth can reliably fill out anxiety forms, supporting the idea that both views are worth collecting.
Why it matters
If parent and youth anxiety scores are far apart, probe daily-living skills and autism history; close agreement often flags better adaptation. Always collect both reports and, when possible, add a brief live observation before writing goals or referrals.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
This study characterized patterns and correlates of parent-youth agreement on social anxiety in youth with and without autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Participants (279 verbally-fluent youth aged 8-16 years, NASD = 144, NTD = 135) completed the SASC-R. Youth with ASD exhibited higher social anxiety across informants. While TD youth endorsed higher anxiety than did parents, self- and parent-reports did not differ in youth with ASD. For children with ASD, higher parent-youth agreement was associated with lower lifetime ASD symptoms and higher adaptive skills. For TD youth, agreement on high anxiety was associated with lowest adaptive skills. Demographic factors (age, verbal IQ, gender) did not relate to agreement for either group. In ASD, parent-child agreement on youth anxiety, either high or low, was associated with better outcomes.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2018 · doi:10.1007/s10803-018-3461-9