(PS4-30) Concordance of Teacher and Parent Report of Executive Functioning in Autistic Children and Adolescents

Autistic children and adolescents often struggle with executive functioning skills (Hill & Bird, 2006). Executive functioning skills include abilities like cognitive flexibility, working memory, task initiation, and inhibition of irrelevant behaviors (Blair, 2016). These crucial skills often serve as predictors for independent living skills (Bishop-Fitzpatrick et al., 2016) and academic readiness (Pellicano et al., 2017) for autistic individuals. The Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function, Second Edition (BRIEF-2) is a questionnaire that assesses executive functioning skills in everyday situations and is oftentimes completed by both a teacher and a caregiver, to examine potential differential functioning in the two environments (Gioia et al., 2015).While previous studies have examined the interrater reliability of parents and teachers of autistic children and adolescents, to our knowledge, this analysis has not been conducted on the most recent version of the BRIEF-2 (Tschida & Yerys, 2022). As this instrument is frequently used in comprehensive autism spectrum disorder evaluations, it is crucial that we gain a better understanding of its interrater reliability compared to the clinical sample on which the measure was initially psychometrically evaluated. To examine the interrater reliability of teacher and parent report of autistic children and adolescents’ executive functioning skills, we conducted intraclass correlation computations on a sample of 74 autistic children and adolescents aged 5-17 years (M_age= 10.7, SD= 3.51) who were diagnosed with ASD at a university-affiliated, community-based autism clinic. The sample was comprised of 53 males and 21 females. We then compared our results to the results of the clinical sample of 1889 autistic children and adolescents  (M_age=11.0, 67.5% males) published when the BRIEF-2 was initially being psychometrically validated using Fisher’s r-to-z transformations. We found a significant positive association between school and home BRIEF-2 ratings on the Behavior Regulation Index (ICC=.43, p< .001), the Cognitive Regulation Index (ICC=.40, p< .001), and the Global Executive Composite (ICC=.35, p< .01). There was no significant association between school and home BRIEF-2 ratings on the Emotion Regulation Index (ICC=.15, p=.22). We found a significant association between school and home BRIEF-2 ratings on 7 of the 9 underlying scales. Finally, we found that there were no significant differences between our sample’s significant correlations and those reported in the BRIEF-2 clinical sample. These findings suggest that the BRIEF-2 has comparable interrater reliability in the assessment of autistic children and adolescents as it does in the clinical sample on which it was initially psychometrically validated. More research is needed to assess differences in reporting on the Emotion Regulation Index and several of the nonsignificant subscales. Implications for the assessment of executive functioning skills in autistic individuals are discussed.