Social Responsiveness Scale: Standardization and Validation of the Dutch Adult Version

Background:

Autistic traits tend to be continuously distributed in the general population (Constantino & Todd, 2003; Ronald et al., 2006). The Social Responsiveness Scale (SRS) (Constantino et al., 2003) is a 65-item reporter based questionnaire with a total score and 5 theory-based subscales. This informant-report questionnaire has proven to quantify autistic traits in a reliable way. We translated the adult research SRS into Dutch and generated a self-report version for adults of this questionnaire. Both versions were back translated into English and approved by Dr. Constantino and the original publisher.

Objectives:

1)    To confirm the validity of the Dutch informant-report SRS in the general Dutch-speaking population (Netherlands and Flanders (Belgium)). 
2)    To validate the Dutch self-report questionnaire in the same population.
3)    To describe the distribution of autistic traits as measured by the SRS in the general population.

Methods:

Randomly selected adults in Flanders and the Netherlands are asked by e-mail to participate. They can register on an internet website and fill out SRS questionnaires about themselves and their partner, and their partner is asked to do the same. Only questionnaires without missing items are taken into account for the analyses. We will produce descriptive statistics (distribution of SRS-scores in the general population, for both men and women) and measures of reliability (test-retest, interrater, internal consistency of total scores and subscale scores) of both versions of the Dutch SRS. A factor analysis will be carried out on the other-report as well as the self-report questionnaire.

Results:

Preliminary results from the Netherlands (N=538 for self-report, N=370 for partner-report) show a good (two week) test-retest reliability (self-report: 0.86 for total score, 0.65-0.84 for subscale scores; partner-report: 0.82 for total score, 0.64-0.85 for subscale scores). Total internal consistency is high for both versions of the Dutch SRS (0.92 for self-report, 0.95 for other-report), with two items not (or even negatively) correlating with the total score. Subscale internal consistencies are sufficiently high as well (0.56-0.83 for self-report; 0.67-0.89 for partner-report). More results will be available at the  IMFAR conference.

Conclusions:

The preliminary results suggest that the Dutch Social Responsiveness Scale for Adults and the newly developed self-report version of this questionnaire have psychometric properties comparable to the original questionnaire.