Development and Psychometric Evaluation of Visual Tool of Threat Perception for Preschoolers with Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Descriptive Study

Examining the ability of threat perception in children with autism requires simple and visual tools. Therefore, the aim of this study was to develop and determine the psychometric properties of the threat perception tool in preschool children with autism.

In the present descriptive study, the sample group consisted of 82 children aged 3 to 5 years old with autism in Tehran in 2020. To design this tool, the stimuli identified and used in literature as threatening and dangerous stimuli were extracted and a visual tool was designed based on them. Content validity, convergent validity, and discriminant validity were used to assess the validity of the tool. Reliability was examined by test-retest and inter-rater reliability.

The results showed that according to experts, the tool had a good content validity. The Pearson’s correlation coefficient between the child’s score in the designed tool and the score given by the mother and the teacher to the child’s ability to perceive danger and threat, and the child's score in the Spence Children’s Anxiety Scale were 0.63, 0.81, and 0.41, respectively, that indicated a good convergent validity. Also, the significant difference between normal and autistic children was a confirmation of the tool’s differential validity (p=0.003). The intra-class correlation coefficients of retest and inter-rater reliability were obtained 0.81 and 0.71, respectively.

The findings of the study showed that perception threat tool is a valid and reliable measure for assessing threat perception ability of preschoolers with autism and can be used as a useful tool in psychological research and clinical context.