Gender Differences: Confirmatory Factor Analysis of the ADOS-II

Recent research has suggested that autism may present differently in girls compared to boys, encouraging the exploration of a sex-differential diagnostic criteria. Gender differences in diagnostic assessments have been shown on the ADOS-II, such that, on average, females score significantly lower than males on all scales and are less likely to show atypicality on most items related to social communicative difficulties. Yet, gender differences in the latent structure of instruments like the ADOS-II have not been examined systematically.

As such, this secondary data analysis examined 4,100 youth diagnosed with autism (M_age = 9.9, 813 female & 3287 male) examined item response trends by gender on the ADOS-II Module 3.

Multi-Group Confirmatory Factor Analysis results show that the factor loadings of four ADOS-II items differ across the genders. One SCD item and one RRB item are strongly related to the latent factor in the female group, while two RRB items have larger factor loadings in the male group.

The assumption of an identical latent factor structure for the ADOS-II Module 3 for males and females might not be justifiable. Possible diagnostic implications are discussed.