(PS4-56) Parent-child Agreement on Emotion-based Measures in Autistic Youth

Introduction: When considering agreement between autistic youth and their parent on emotion-focused assessment, several researchers have documented fair-to-moderate agreement between parent and child reporters on measures of anxiety (e.g., SCARED, SCAS, CATS; Blakeley-Smith et al., 2011; Ozsivadjian et al., 2014) whereas other researchers have found that parents report higher levels of anxiety symptoms than children do (e.g., via MASC; Kalvin et al., 2020; BASC, Taylor et al., 2020).  Additionally, some studies have revealed that parents generally report higher levels of depression than their autistic children do, resulting in poor parent-child agreement (Kaat & Lecavalier, 2015; Schwartzman & Corbett, 2020). Given that agreement is often inconsistent and parent report may not best reflect the feelings and experience of the autistic youth, it is critical to understand what discrepancies arise, and what demographic factors may improve or exacerbate the discrepancy.

Method: Data used in this study is from a larger clinical trial focused on improving emotion regulation in ADOS-confirmed autistic youth. In addition to demographic information, emotion-focused assessments include parent and child report on the Emotion Dysregulation Inventory (EDI), PROMIX-Anxiety, and PROMIS-Depression scales. It is important to note that the autistic youth completed a first-person worded EDI as a self-report version is not currently available. We assessed the relationship between responses by conducting bivariate correlations between reporters, in addition to conducting intraclass correlations coefficient (ICC).

Results: A group of 74 pairs of autistic youth and their parent completed emotion-focused assessments as a part of their participation in a clinical trial. Youth ranged in age from 12-22, were 71.7% White, 9.2% Black, and 19.1% of participants reported other or mixed race, and 74.2% of the sample were male, 20.8% female, and 1.7% reporting their gender as other. Significant correlations were found between parent and child report on the EDI Dysphoria subscale (r = .286, p = .005), PROMIS Anxiety (r = .342, p = < .001), and PROMIS Depression (r = .522, p = < .001), but not EDI Reactivity (r = .167, p = .155). In this sample, ICC range from unacceptable to poor with the EDI Dysphoria was found to be ⍺ = .433, PROMIS Anxiety ⍺ = .508, and PROMIS Depression ⍺ = .685.

Discussion: While some scales were found to correlate in terms of parent-child agreement, none of these commonly used emotion-focused assessments reported adequate reliability. This further asserts the needs for our field to create more reliable assessments of emotion that best measure the experience of autistic individuals. Future research should focus on improved assessments and better understanding of demographic variables that may change measure agreement.