[Diagnosing the social behavior of autistic children]

This article describes a new assessment of the social behaviour of autistic children. The relevance of clinical and developmental diagnostic criteria for the social interaction with autistic children will be illustrated. A practical example stresses that new developmental psychology studies on autistic children's reciprocal interaction, analyse the social behavior in the "social context". Aspects of the social context--the social situation and the background knowledge--are used to demonstrate the construction of observation units. Those units will structure and help to control the social interaction of the examiner and the child. One observation unit consists of the interactional situation, the interactional style and the interaction behavior. The construction of several observational units as quasi-natural situations and the audio-visual record of the social behavior in those situations permit the collection of qualitative deviations in the social behavior of autistic children. Identification, differential diagnosis and therapy-orientated assessment can be based on those informations.