The Feedback Session of an Autism Assessment: A Scoping Review of Clinical Practice Guideline Recommendations.
Ellen Pattison, Alexandra Ure, Sharon R Mittiga and 2 others
PMID 34036417WHAT IT FOUND
Autism diagnosis feedback guidelines vary widely and often lack detail.
Most recommendations rest on expert opinion, not evidence, so no single guideline defines best practice for telling families results.
Key findings
01Five of the 17 included autism assessment guidelines did not contain recommendations for feedback, while twelve guidelines had feedback sections for content analysis.
02Only five guidelines described how feedback recommendations were developed, and all reported feedback recommendations were based on consensus opinion of the guideline development group.
03No guideline specifically recommended discussing communication ability, and only two guidelines recommended discussing adaptive functioning.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
Only English-language guidelines were included, so recommendations from other languages were missed. Only the first author extracted data, which may have introduced bias. The AGREE-II quality checklist was adapted to assessment only, so its scores may not compare directly with other guideline appraisals. There is no validated cut-off for AGREE-II scores, so the quality categories depend on the authors' chosen thresholds. The review looked only at feedback sections, so recommendations that were implied elsewhere in a guideline may have been missed. The feedback recommendations themselves were mostly based on expert consensus, not high-quality evidence.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read these guideline recommendations as evidence that a particular feedback approach improves family outcomes. The review found that most recommendations were based on expert consensus, only five guidelines described their development methods, and five included guidelines gave no feedback recommendations.