Jones Rebecca M, Pickles Andrew, Lord Catherine
Center for Autism and the Developing Brain, Department of Psychiatry, Weill Cornell Medicine, 21 Bloomingdale Road, White Plains, NY 10605 USA.
Department of Biostatistics, Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London, London, UK.
Mol Autism. 2017 Jun 17;8:28. doi: 10.1186/s13229-017-0144-x. eCollection 2017.
A core difficulty for individuals with autism is making friends and successfully engaging and interacting with peers. The majority of measures to assess peer interactions are observations in a school setting or self-report. The present study examined the convergent validity of using a teacher rating scale, the Penn Interactive Peer Play Scale (PIPPS), for collecting information about the quality of peer interactions at school.
Teachers completed the PIPPS for 107 children with ASD when the child was 9 and 13 years of age. Clinicians completed diagnostic and cognitive assessments and caregivers completed the Autism Diagnostic Interview-Revised (ADI-R) when the child was 9.
Parent report of reciprocal friendships from the ADI-R was associated with teacher report about how socially connected the child was at school on the PIPPS, indicating strong convergence between teachers and parents. Children with more severe restricted and repetitive behaviors and lower verbal abilities were less connected with peers. Children with access to typical peers had more connections with peers compared to those who were in a special education classroom.
The findings suggest that teacher ratings from the PIPPS can accurately capture the quality of peer interactions in children and adolescents with ASD and may be useful for clinicians and researchers to evaluate peer engagement in the classroom.
自闭症患者面临的一个核心困难是交朋友以及与同龄人成功互动。大多数评估同伴互动的方法是在学校环境中进行观察或采用自我报告。本研究考察了使用教师评定量表——宾夕法尼亚互动同伴游戏量表（PIPPS）来收集学校中同伴互动质量信息的收敛效度。
教师在107名自闭症谱系障碍儿童9岁和13岁时完成PIPPS评定。临床医生在儿童9岁时完成诊断和认知评估，照顾者完成修订版自闭症诊断访谈（ADI-R）。
ADI-R中父母报告的相互友谊与教师在PIPPS上报告的孩子在学校的社交联系程度相关，表明教师和父母之间有很强的一致性。具有更严重的受限和重复行为以及较低语言能力的儿童与同伴的联系较少。与在特殊教育班级的儿童相比，有机会接触普通同龄人的儿童与同伴的联系更多。
研究结果表明，PIPPS的教师评定能够准确反映自闭症谱系障碍儿童和青少年的同伴互动质量，可能对临床医生和研究人员评估课堂上的同伴参与情况有用。
