Examining the Process and Impact of Social Problem Solving in Autistic Children.

Social problem solving (SPS) represents a social cognitive reasoning process that gives way to behavior when individuals are navigating challenging social situations. Autistic individuals have been shown to struggle with specific aspects of SPS, which, in turn, has been related to social difficulties in children. However, no previous work has measured how SPS components not only relate to one another but also discretely and conjointly predict autism-related symptoms and social difficulties in autistic children, specifically.

Development and Validation of a Shortened Form of SELweb EE, a Web-Based Assessment of Children's Social and Emotional Competence.

This article describes the development and validation of a shortened form of SELweb EE, a web-based assessment for social-emotional skills in the early elementary grades. Using a Rasch approach, in the first study, we used data from two archival data sets to reduce the number of items in three subtests to create short forms that maintained item fit, item difficulty, item discrimination, and test information function range. In the second study, we created and administered a short form of SELweb EE to a demographically diverse cross-validation sample of 22,683 students.

Web-based Assessment of Social-Emotional Skills in School-Aged Youth with Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Few tools are available to comprehensively describe the unique social-emotional skill profiles of youth with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The present study describes the usability, reliability, and validity of SELweb, a normed, web-based assessment designed to measure four core social-emotional domains, when used to measure these skills in a sample of 57 well-characterized youth with ASD (ages 6-10 years with IQ ≥ 80). SELweb measures facial emotion recognition, theory of mind, social problem solving, and self-control.

Conditional admission, religious exemption type, and nonmedical vaccine exemptions in California before and after a state policy change.

Recent measles and pertussis outbreaks in the US have focused national attention on state laws governing exemptions from mandatory vaccines for school entry. After several years of increases in nonmedical exemptions in California, the state assembly passed Assembly Bill 2109 in 2012, making nonmedical exemptions more difficult to obtain by requiring parents to obtain a signature from a health care provider. We used data from the California Department of Public Health to describe changes in the overall prevalence of personal belief exemptions and compositional changes in immunization status for the school years 2012-2013 through 2015-2016.

Psychometric Properties and Differential Item Functioning of a Web-Based Assessment of Children's Social Perspective-Taking.

Social perspective-taking (SPT), which involves the ability infer others' intentions, is a consequential social cognitive process. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the psychometric properties of a web-based social perspective-taking (SELweb SPT) assessment designed for children in kindergarten through third grade. Data were collected from two separate samples of children.