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The purpose of this paper is to assess the validity of the Autism Diagnostic Interview-Revised (ADI-R) in an Iranian population to determine its efficacy in identifying children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) who parents have Persian-speaking parents.

A case–control study was performed in March until July 2020 in Hamadan city, Iran. The case group was children were examined by the clinicians used a coding scheme based on the DSM-IV criteria for ASD. The control group was all children in the family, including healthy siblings, were asked to participate in the study. The reliability, content and face validity were performed to assess the psychometric properties of the tool. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was performed to evaluate the four-dimensional structure of the tool (Scores A, B, C and D). Statistical analysis was performed using AMOS for SPSS 21, and the statistical significant level was less than 0.05.

The quantitative content validity analysis revealed that the mean of content validity ratio (CVR) and content validity index (CVI) for all domains was 0.94 and 0.91, respectively. For CFA, four domains A, B, C and D were used and demonstrated a good fit (CFI = 0.92 and RMSEA = 0.06). The sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value (PPV) and negative predictive value (NPV) in domains A, B (verbal), C and D were 100%. For domain B (non-verbal), the sensitivity, specificity, PPV and NPV were 86.7%, 100%, 100% and 88.2%, respectively.

This study showed that ADI-R has sufficient ability to discriminate between children with ASD and those with no psychiatric diagnosis, and it is a reliable tool in Iran. The sensitivity and specificity for correctly diagnosing ASD was high, regardless of the age and cognitive level of the examiner.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper on psychometric properties of ADI-R in children with ASD.

This study aims to investigate the psychometric properties of the social communication questionnaire (SCQ) in Iran by identifying children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) who had Persian-speaking parents.

A case–control study was performed from June to August 2021 in Hamadan, Iran. The case group consisted of children who were examined by clinicians who used a coding scheme based on the DSM-V criteria for ASD by a psychiatrist. The control group consisted of non-ASD children who were asked to participate in the study. This study conducted the reliability, content and face validity to evaluate the psychometric properties of the tool. In the first step, Kaiser–Meyer–Olkin and Bartlett’s test were used to determine sampling adequacy and appropriateness of correlation matrix. In the second step, the exploratory factor analysis approach was used. The method of extracting the factors is done by using the varimax rotation method and selecting the number of factors using an eigenvalue and scree plot. Statistical analysis was performed using Software Package for Social Sciences 21 with the statistical significance set at level less than 0.05.

The quantitative content validity analysis revealed that the mean of content validity ratio and content validity index were 0.92 and 0.91, respectively. Mean score ± standard deviation in the two groups of ASD and control were 14.23 ± 3.84 and 7.83 ± 4.80, respectively. With cut-off point >12.5, sensitivity, specificity and misclassification error values were 73.33%, 80.0% and 23%, respectively.

The results showed that the internal consistency of the SCQ is desirable. Also, the internal consistency of its five subscales was obtained between 0.700 and 0.87. The findings showed that SCQ questionnaire is highly reliable in reciprocal social interaction (Factor 1) and the total score, while other factors were relatively reliable.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first paper on psychometric properties of SCQ in ASD children in Iran.