(PS4-72) The Autistic Youth Wellbeing Scale: Looking Beyond Goal Attainment in Behavioral Health Treatment

Background: Wellbeing is the measure of a person’s overall happiness, satisfaction with life, and positive outlook on life. Wellbeing of autistic people is an important construct to understand, particularly in the realm of therapies meant to assist in improving the person’s life. While there are therapeutic methods believed to improve wellbeing or a person’s overall life, clinicians in behavioral health treatment often solely focus on areas such as goal attainment and miss out on the bigger picture - are the therapeutic methods improving a person’s wellbeing? In 2021, a large behavioral health organization set out to understand the wellbeing of over 12,000 participants. To do this, these authors set out to find a wellbeing scale which would measure accurately an autistic person’s wellbeing. After months of research into existing wellbeing scales, these authors determined it was necessary to create a wellbeing scale with an emic approach for the autistic population due to challenges of finding a wellbeing scale which met certain criteria such as being shorter than 20 questions and was specific to the autistic population.

Objectives: To create a wellbeing scale for autistic youth with good validity and reliability. Additionally, it was important for these authors to create a scale with less than 20 questions due to the challenges in the completion rate of longer scales the behavioral health organization has historically experienced.

Methods: To do this, the authors began to research factors contributing to wellbeing and then created questions based on what was determined to be the top three factors. From there, the authors received stakeholder feedback from autistic and neurotypical youth and made necessary changes based on their feedback. Once all necessary updates were made, a sample population of 471 autistic youth took the youth version of the wellbeing scale in order to determine the psychometric properties of the scale.

Results: Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) and Bartlett’s test of sphericity revealed the data were appropriate for factor analysis (KMO = 0.88; Bartlett Sphericity, X2 [df = 105] 1734.83; p < .01). Principal component Analysis (PCA) was conducted with a Varimax rotation. PCA revealed four components with eigenvalues greater than one which explained 31.79%, 8.32%, 7.39%, and 6.89% of the total variance, respectively. Originally, the youth wellbeing scale was developed with three components; however, factor analysis resulted in four factors across 471 respondents. These included self-management, inter/intrapersonal, self-determination, and happiness. Additionally, the scale was revealed to have very good reliability with a Cronbach’s alpha of 0.84.

Conclusions: It is vital for organizations serving a particular population in the realm of intervention to measure meaningful progress and change. Wellbeing is an important construct to understand in the life of autistic people. The youth wellbeing scale allows for understanding of individual wellbeing, has a good response rate, and also has strong reliability, thus allowing for any organization to understand how their clients are being impacted by their respective therapies, services, and interventions.