Validity and reliability of the Turkish Version of the Clinician Rated Severity of Autism Spectrum and Social Communication Disorders Scale

Objective: The purpose of the present study was to investigate the validity and reliability of the Turkish form of the Clinician Rated Severity of Autism Spectrum and Social Communication Disorders Scale. The scale was originally developed to measure the severity of autism spectrum and social communication disorders regarding the DSM-5 criteria. Methods: The study was conducted in the Department of Psychiatry at Celal Bayar University Hospital. The participants were in- or out-patients diagnosed with any psychotic disorders according to DSM-5. The exclusion criteria were comorbidity of other psychiatric disorders and/or physical diseases. The study was carried out with a total of 49 patients who were diagnosed with schizophrenia (n=40), schizoaffective disorder (n=3), and not otherwise specified psychotic disorder (n=3). One hundred and one volunteers without any mental or physical disease were also included to represent the healthy control. Reliability analysis was performed to examine the internal consistency of the Turkish version of the scale. Additionally, item-total correlations were reported. In validity analyses, comparison of the total score of the scale in the patient and control groups was evaluated for the discriminative validity. ROC analysis was also performed. Results: 52.7% of the sample were male (n=79). 69.3% of them were graduated from university (n=104), 19.3% from high school (n=29), and 8% from elementary school (n=12). The mean age of the study group was 26.3 +/- 10.3 years. Disease duration of psychotic disorder group was 18,29 +/- 6.43 years. The internal consistency of the Autism Spectrum and Social Communication Disorder Scale was 0.81. Furthermore, item-total correlations revealed that all items in the scale contributed to the consistency of scores with item-total correlations approaching 0.70. The mean score of the scale in the patient group on the scale was 1.42 whereas the mean score of the healthy group was 0.0. The t-test analysis indicated that there was a statistically significant difference between the sample group and the healthy group in their scores on the scale. In the ROC analysis, the area under the curve was 0.84. Conclusion: Results demonstrated that the Turkish version of Autism Spectrum and Social Communication Disorder Scale was a valid and reliable instrument which may serve as useful in guiding future research that aims to understand autism spectrum and social communication disorder.