Discussion
Novel findings indicated that the BOSCC performed similarly across home and school contexts. Specifically, scores improved in both contexts, and SC and total scores were highly related across contexts. Children showed improvements across all subscales and the total score over the course of the year. Interestingly, there were larger improvements in the school context. Larger gains in the school context may be attributed to children receiving the intervention in school. Behavioral changes may not generalize across contexts (Gunning et al., 2009) so for children to show improvements in multiple settings, an intervention may need to include home-school collaborations.
For both timepoints, the SC subscale and total scores were highly correlated across both contexts, unlike the RRB and OAB. This makes sense given that some RRBs likely are context-bound or elicited by specific stimuli (e.g., familiar adults, specific routines) that may be more or less present in one context versus another, aligning with previous research suggesting the presence of RRBs often differ between contexts (Stronach & Wetherby, 2014). Overall, the RRB subscale may be more influenced by contextual features, whereas the SC subscale appeared to be more stable.
While subscale and total scores were correlated at the individual timepoints, we did not find a strong correlation between the changes in child scores across contexts over time. Thus, researchers must carefully consider the purpose of their study when selecting outcome measures and measurement contexts. If the goal is to measure child skill acquisition, measuring the behavior in a context similar to the intervention is likely more important (e.g., if the intervention was implemented by a teacher at school, then outcomes should be measured at school); however, if the goal is to measure the generalization of skills, then measuring across different contexts becomes more important.