Stability of caregiver talk (Bottema-Beutel et al., 2025)

<p dir="ltr"><b>Purpose: </b>This study aims to help researchers design observational measurement systems that yield sufficiently stable scores for estimating caregiver talk among caregivers of infant siblings of autistic and non-autistic children. Stable estimates minimize error introduced by facets of the measurement system, such as variability between coders or measurement sessions.</p><p dir="ltr"><b>Method: </b>Analyses of variance were used to partition error variance between coder and session and to derive <i>g</i> coefficients. Decision studies determined the number of sessions and coders over which scores must be averaged to achieve sufficiently stable <i>g</i> coefficients (0.80). Twelve infants at elevated likelihood of an autism diagnosis and 12 infants with population-level likelihood of autism diagnosis participated in two semistructured observation sessions when the children were 12–18 months of age and again 9 months later. Caregiver follow-in talk was coded from these sessions.</p><p dir="ltr"><b>Results: </b>Two sessions and one coder were needed to achieve sufficient stability for follow-in talk and follow-in comments for both groups of infants at both time points. However, follow-in directives did not reach sufficient stability for any combination of sessions or coders for the population-level likelihood group at either time point, or for the elevated likelihood group at Time 2.</p><p dir="ltr"><b>Conclusion:</b> Researchers should plan to collect at least two sessions to derive sufficiently stable estimates of caregiver talk in infants at elevated and general population–level likelihood for autism.</p><p dir="ltr"><b>Supplemental Material S1.</b> Sums of squares from ANOVAs.</p><p dir="ltr">Bottema-Beutel, K., Guo, R., Braun, C., Dunham-Carr, K., Markfeld, J. E., Pulliam, G., Madison Clark, S., Keçeli-Kaysılı, B., Feldman, J. I., & Woynaroski, T. (2025). Considerations for measuring caregiver talk in interactions with infants at elevated and population-level likelihood for autism: deriving stable estimates. <i>Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research</i>, <i>68</i>(1), 234–247. <a href="https://doi.org/10.1044/2024_JSLHR-24-00312" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">https://doi.org/10.1044/2024_JSLHR-24-00312</a></p>