Assessing children with autism : highlights from professionals' reports

Abstract

The particular pattern of symptoms exhibited by children with autism and the vast variation of the presentation of these symptoms present a challenge to professionals who assess them. Various criteria are recognised as important features that are used to make a diagnosis of autism. These include the triad of impairments and related untypical behaviours. This study is an attempt to identify the features which professionals in the field, namely psychologists and speech therapists, describe in their reports of children diagnosed with autism. A qualitative research design was adopted. Seventeen psychologist's reports and sixteen speech therapist's reports were examined to obtain the major information they reported when assessing children suspected of having autism. A qualitative analysis revealed that the features used by the professionals in their reports were coherent most of the time with the features described in the theoretical framework of the study, including the diagnostic systems that are most widely used. It was concluded that the diagnostic instruments developed for the assessment of autism are found useful also at the practitioner level for communicating the diagnosis to clients