The Social Responsiveness Scale (SRS), an important instrument for measuring the social aspects of ASD, was added as a core IAN questionnaire in February, 2008.
Dr. John Constantino, an Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Pediatrics at Washington University in St. Louis and the author of the SRS, has worked with the IAN team in order to make this valuable instrument available to the project.
The Social Responsiveness Scale
The SRS is a 15-minute questionnaire that measures the severity of autistic social impairment across the entire range of the autism spectrum, from nonexistent to severe.
Parents will be given the opportunity to fill out the SRS for their children with ASD, as well as any unaffected children, who are between the ages of 4 and 18.
An Important Tool for Researchers
The SRS is a well respected instrument familiar to many autism researchers. It has been validated in published research involving over 10,000 children to date. Ratings of autistic social impairment on the SRS have been shown to be extremely reliable across raters and over time. This makes the SRS a crucial autism research tool.
Because it is so easy to administer, researchers can use the SRS to consider autistic traits and symptoms not just in an affected child, but in their unaffected siblings or other family members. In brief, the SRS will aid researchers in their evaluations of autistic traits, family characteristics, and treatment outcomes.
Note: We regret we cannot provide the complete list of questions within the SRS, as we have for the other IAN questionnaires. The SRS is under copyright to Western Psychological Services of Los Angeles, California.
