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The increase in autism prevalence and presentation in the media suggests a rise in public awareness. This paper aims to explore what factors (contact, knowledge and ethnicity) may be associated to positive attitudes towards individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD).

An online survey examined contact with and knowledge of ASD among Black, Asian and White ethnic groups to predict public attitudes to people with ASD.

In multiple regression models, the results suggested that the level of contact predicts positive attitudes towards autism when demographic factors were accounted. The level of knowledge about autism were significantly associated to attitudes, but not consistently when demographic factors were accounted. However, differences in knowledge and attitudes to people with ASD were identified amongst Black, Asian and White ethnic groups.

These findings have implications for policy and public health and education campaigns, including ensuring contact and knowledge of autism among the public.

These findings have implications for policy and public health and education campaigns, including ensuring contact and knowledge of autism among the public. Additionally, further effort is required to target public knowledge and attitudes to autism, particularly among ethnic groups. Institutional support tailored to encourage structured and unstructured contact across public domains such as education, health, social and care practices could effectively reduce prejudice between the public and people with ASD over time.

The Behavior Problems Inventory-Short Form (BPI-S) is a shorter version of the Behavior Problems Inventory-01. In this paper, BPI-S population norms are reported from a total administrative population of adults with intellectual disability (ID). To facilitate the use of the BPI-S in clinical services to assess behavior change, the purpose of this paper is to describe how to use BPI-S clinically significant and reliable change (RC) scores.

Data were gathered on 265 adults with ID known to services. Proxy informants completed the BPI-S on challenging behaviors over the previous six months. Clinically significant cut-off values and RC scores were calculated using the Jacobson and Truax’s (1991) method.

BPI-S clinical reference data are presented to provide benchmarks for individual and group comparisons regarding challenging behavior. Examples demonstrate how to use clinical norms to determine change.

Behavior change is a major goal of researchers and practitioners. Data from the present study can make the BPI-S a valuable tool for determining change in challenging behavior following service input or intervention.

Whilst well used in research, the BPI-S may be less extensively used in practice. This present study provides data to enable researchers and practitioners to use the BPI-S more widely in assessing clinical outcomes, such as intervention research and service evaluation.

Relatively little is known about autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in later life, though the available evidence indicates that it is as prevalent as in childhood and youth. The current study was an on‐line questionnaire (of basic biographical information, general health, quality of life and score on the Autism Quotient [AQ] measure) of UK‐resident adults in their forties who had been diagnosed with ASD or suspected they had ASD. The findings indicated health and quality of life problems very significantly greater than the population norms, with strong indications that prototypical problems of younger people with ASD (such as social isolation and anxiety) persist throughout adult life, even in individuals in high‐income professions. Respondents who thought they had ASD were qualitatively identical to respondents with a formal diagnosis ‐ only the strength of symptoms differed. Scores on the AQ measure did not correlate with other symptoms. Although the study is of a relatively small number (N = 29) of people and there are limitations imposed by the study's design, the findings are robust, and indicate an urgent need to examine ASD in the older population using a larger, more demographically representative study.