The Construct Validity of the Childhood Joint Attention Rating Scale (C-JARS) in School-Aged Autistic Children.
Sandy L Birkeneder, Jennifer Bullen, Nancy McIntyre and 5 others
PMID 37480436WHAT IT FOUND
Parents completed the 55-item C-JARS to rate their children's joint attention.
Autistic children had significantly more atypical symptoms and less prosocial sharing than neurotypical peers. Scores correlated with clinical observations of social affect but not repetitive behaviors, supporting its use as a specific measure of social symptoms in research.
Key findings
01The C-JARS scores significantly distinguished autistic children from neurotypical peers, with autistic children showing higher social symptom scores and lower prosocial scores.
02C-JARS scores showed convergent validity with the ADOS-2 Social Affect scale and divergent validity against the ADOS-2 Restricted and Repetitive Behavior scale.
03The association between C-JARS scores and social outcomes remained significant after controlling for parent-reported language abilities, suggesting the measure is not simply reflecting language deficits.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
The study relied solely on parent report for the primary measure, which may inflate correlations with other parent-reported measures like temperament. The sample size prevents generalizing sensitivity and specificity statistics to clinical practice or population levels. The C-JARS was not directly compared against objective observational measures of joint attention (like eye-tracking or specific behavioral coding), so its link to the core construct is inferred rather than proven. The association between anxiety and C-JARS scores varied by IQ group, suggesting emotional factors may influence parent reports in complex ways.
Declared interests
The study was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health. No other conflicts of interest were declared in the provided text.
The easy way to misread this
Do not use the reported sensitivity and specificity percentages as diagnostic cutoffs for identifying autism in clinical practice. The authors state these statistics cannot be generalized to population levels or clinical applications due to the study's sampling method and size.