Valid when valued: A community-engaged framework and toolkit to improve identification of autistic people's motor difficulties in research and practice.
Haylie L Miller, Priscila M Tamplain, Miri Tal-Saban, Stefania Zoia, Anna L Barnett, Sheila E Henderson
PMID 42582827WHAT IT FOUND
Not a research study.
A practice-guidance framework describing how to adapt the MABC-3 motor assessment for autistic people, developed with community input. No participants, no outcomes, no evidence of effect. The authors themselves say validation studies are still needed.
What this paper is
This is a community-engaged framework and practice-guidance document describing how to adapt the MABC-3 motor assessment for autistic people. It reports no participants, no intervention, no outcomes, and no empirical results. The authors state explicitly that empirical validation studies are still needed and that they plan to conduct feasibility case studies in the future. There is no data to summarise.
Declared interests
Two of the authors (Henderson and Barnett) are the authors of the MABC-3, the very assessment tool the toolkit is built around. The toolkit is a complementary guide to the MABC-3 manual, so the authors are recommending adaptations to a product they wrote.
The easy way to misread this
Do not treat this framework as evidence that adapted MABC-3 administration produces more accurate or different scores than standard administration. The authors state no empirical validation has been done yet; they plan to conduct feasibility and reliability studies in the future. The illustrative examples in the paper are hypothetical scenarios, not reported data.