Understanding parent-child social informant discrepancy in youth with high functioning autism spectrum disorders.
Youth with HF-ASD often think their social skills are fine while parents see big deficits, and that mismatch drives parent stress and teen anxiety.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Lerner et al. (2012) asked parents and youth with high-functioning autism to rate the teen's social skills. They used standard survey forms. The team then looked at how far the two scores drifted apart.
They also checked whether that gap predicted parent stress or teen mood problems.
What they found
Parents scored their kids about one standard deviation below the norm. The same teens rated themselves right at the typical peer level.
The bigger the gap, the higher the parents' stress and the more internalizing symptoms the youth reported.
How this fits with other research
Johnson et al. (2009) saw the same pattern three years earlier. Youth with HF-ASD under-reported autistic traits and over-reported empathy compared with parent views. The 2012 paper widened the lens to social skills and added real-life fallout: parental stress.
Heald et al. (2020) later repeated the finding in a new sample. Parents again reported more depression, anxiety, and hyperactivity than the teens claimed, confirming the gap is stable across domains.
Kalyva (2010) lined up four voices: self, mom, dad, teacher. Rater agreement was low for students with Asperger's, backing the core message: one informant is not enough.
Why it matters
Always collect both parent and youth reports when you assess social skills in HF-ASD. If the scores clash, view the gap as a risk flag. High parent stress and teen anxiety may follow. Use the mismatch to start a conversation, not to pick a winner.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
We investigated discrepancies between parent- and self-reported social functioning among youth with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Three distinct samples showed discrepancies indicating that parents viewed their children as performing one standard deviation below a standardization mean, while youth viewed themselves as comparably-skilled relative to peers. Discrepancies predicted lower parental self-efficacy, and lower youth-reported hostile attributions to peers, marginally-lower depression, and decreased post-treatment social anxiety. Discrepancies predicted outcomes better than parent- or youth-report alone. Informant discrepancies may provide valuable additional information regarding child psychopathology, parental perceptions of parenting stress, and youth treatment response. Findings support a model where abnormal self-perceptions in ASD stem from inflated imputation of subjective experiences to others, and provide direction for improving interventions for youth and parents.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2012 · doi:10.1007/s10803-012-1525-9