Initial Examination of Use of the Brief Observation of Social Communication Change (BOSCC) across Home and School Contexts
Abstract
This study investigated the potential influences of administration context on the measurement of child skills over time. The BOSCC was administered to preschool-aged children with autism at two time points at school by trained research staff and at home by the parent. Children showed improvements across all subscales and the total score over time. The Social-communication and Core total scores yield similar information in both contexts, but Restricted and Repetitive Behavior and Other Abnormal Behavior subscales scores were not related. Further, subscale and total scores are correlated between contexts at individual time points but not over time. These results underscore the importance of purposeful selection of measures and their administration context.
Keywords: Measurement, context, social-communication, home, school
Social-communication (SC) functioning is a core diagnostic feature of autism and is pivotal to the development of later language and social interaction skills (e.g., Mundy, et al., 1994). Due to the critical nature of SC skills, many interventions target this feature of autism; however, one major challenge in autism research is finding sensitive and reliable outcome measures. This is especially true for SC because these behaviors are often very subtle and difficult to observe (Anagnostou et al., 2015; McConachie et al., 2015).
One novel and increasingly used measure of SC is the Brief Observation of Social Communication Change (BOSCC) (Grzadzinski, et al., 2016), a play-based assessment specifically designed to measure change across three subscales including: Social-Communication (SC); Restricted Repetitive Behaviors (RRB), and Other Abnormal Behaviors (OAB). While prior studies have demonstrated favorable psychometric properties (e.g., Gengoux et al., 2019; Kitzerow et al., 2016), there remain gaps in our understanding of how contextual features of BOSCC administration (e.g., interactive partner, administration setting) may impact its utility.
The BOSCC was developed to address the need for a measure of SC that can detect subtle changes in these behaviors over time (Kim et al., 2019). The recommended administration of the BOSCC is by a researcher blind to child treatment status (Grzadzinski & Lord, 2018); however, there have been variations to the administration context (e.g., Carruthers et al., 2021; Kitzerow et al., 2016; Frost et al., 2019). To our knowledge, only one study evaluated the BOSCC as a measure of SC across play and snack time routines in the home context (Frost et al., 2019). The BOSCC demonstrated utility in measuring social-communication change during both play and snack time contexts at home; however, resulting changes in the restricted and repetitive behavior subscale were unclear. To date, investigations of how both the interpersonal (i.e., play partner) and environmental features (e.g., home and school) of the BOSCC administration context influence measurement of change in social skills overtime are lacking. There has not yet been a systematic investigation of how the administration context and adult administrator affects child scores on the BOSCC. Thus, the specific research questions of this study include:
What is the association between scores when the BOSCC is administered in a school context by unfamiliar research staff versus at home by a parent?
Do BOSCC scores show similar changes over time across both administration contexts?