The Medical Evaluation of Autism in Preschoolers: Examining the Discrepancies between Parental and Clinical Impressions

The proposed study will examine a clinic population of children being evaluated for early developmental delays in order to investigate how often parents and clinicians differ in their opinions regarding the presence of an ASD diagnosis. This study will further examine which opinion is more likely to correlate with the Autism Diagnostic Observation Scale (ADOS), and whether the differing opinions are more likely with specific single clinical diagnoses (mild, moderate, severe intellectual limitation, hearing impairment, specific language impairments) or with common combinations of diagnoses (e.g.: Cognitive Impairment or Specific Language Impairment (SLI) with co-morbid Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), or Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD) etc).