Construction and Preliminary Psychometric Properties of Perceived Autism Related Stigma by Association Scale

Abstract

In Pakistan, autism is commonly a misdiagnosed and unheeded health issue. Literature displays that parents of children with autism spectrum disorder experience stigma by association, but it is often ignored in quantitative studies while studying the risk factors of the wellbeing of parents of children with autism spectrum disorder. There is no scale available that measures the phenomenon of stigma by association in the parents of children with autism spectrum disorder. After generations of items by following deductive and inductive methods, and pilot study, the exploratory factor analysis was run on 26 items by involving 359 parents and confirmatory factor analysis was run on 24 items by collecting data of 500 parents from different institutions, platforms and Autism Centers of Punjab. After exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, 21 items were retained with three well defined factor structure of PerceivedAutism Related Stigma by Association Scale (viz., Attitude of community, Behavior of community, and Emotional burden). The Cronbach’s alpha of the subscale of perceived autism related stigma by association ranged from .69 to .82. Further, convergent and discriminant validity of the scale were established by finding its relationship with the Perceived Stigma Scale and Rosenberg’s Self-esteem Scale. Results revealed that the newly developed Perceived Autism Related Stigma byAssociation Scale has good psychometric properties, which can be used in hospital as a standardized tool for measuring stigma by association in parents of children with autism spectrum disorder.