Development and testing of the Autism Brief Criticism Coding System for families of autistic youth

The study of parental criticism has informed understanding of family processes across populations. Historically, criticism has been measured as a component of the larger construct of parental expressed emotion. However, existing measurement systems are limited by complexity, cost, and potentially questionable reliability and validity for use with families of autistic children.

The current study describes the development and testing of a streamlined, freely accessible, and population-specific system for coding critical comments from language samples of parents of autistic youth. Rather than adapting existing systems for use with this population, an emic approach was prioritized, involving contributions from a team with diverse lived experience. The resultant system, the Autism Brief Criticism (ABC) Coding System was then applied to an existing dataset of speech samples from 73 families for whom codes from two existing systems were available.

The ABC demonstrated good inter-rater reliability and high convergent validity with existing systems. Evidence supporting concurrent and discriminant validity was obtained through examination of associations with various child and parenting constructs, and the ABC was the only system to identify associations with children's internalizing symptoms.

With strong psychometrics and differential predictive utility, the ABC holds promise as a community-informed, population-specific measure of parental criticism. Implications for future research and applications to intervention are discussed.