Differences Between the Childhood Autism Rating Scale and the Social Responsiveness Scale in Assessing Symptoms of Children with Autistic Spectrum Disorder

This study aimed to compare symptoms of autism spectrum disorder using the Childhood Autism Rating Scale (CARS) and the Social Responsiveness Scale (SRS™-2) and to investigate their influencing factors. The diagnostic agreement was 92.7%, but with a fair Kappa value (0.247). Children’s verbal comprehension was related to the CARS scores, and no variables were related to the SRS™-2 scores. Generally, significant small correlations were found between the two measures in children with normal or borderline to below average verbal comprehension (rs = 0.32 ~ 0.49, p < .005), but not in those with impaired verbal comprehension. The CARS and the SRS™-2 may contain different explicit behaviors and collect different perspectives (i.e., those of caregivers and professionals). Therefore, they appear to complement each other.