<div>Initial Examination of Use of the Brief Observation of Social
Communication Change (BOSCC) across Home and School Contexts</div><div>Abstract</div><div>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.</div><div>Keywords: Measurement, context, social-communication, home, school</div><div>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).</div><div>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.</div><div>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 &amp; 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:</div><div>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?</div><div>Do BOSCC scores show similar changes over time across both
administration contexts?</div>