Indicadores de la conducta adaptativa en niños con TEA

Abstract

Adaptive behaviour refers to the effectiveness with which a person responds to then atural and social demands of their environment. This concept has been modified, and nowadays we refer to it as the set of conceptual, social and practical skills that the subject learns and that allow him/her to respond to the circumstances of his/her daily life. It is one of the mos trelevant criteria that determine the degree of disability and constitutes one of the most representative symptoms to be taken into account in the diagnosis of ASD. The general objective of the study was to analyse, through the GARS-2 and ICAP indicators, the relations hipbetween adaptive behaviour, with the different skills that comprise it, and the diagnosis of ASD,as well as to determine its relationship with gender, age and other personal and socio-familial variables. For this purpose, a sample of 209 people was used, of whom one group (n= 111) had been diagnosed with ASD (37 women and 74 men) aged between 2 and 20 years. A second group(n= 98) consisted of normotypical individuals (56 females and 42 males) aged between 3 and 23years. The data were analysed by means of non-parametric contrasts and correlations, as wellas the tree classification test.The results not only show the existence of an identifiable profile of adaptive behaviour in participants with ASD, but also reinforce the possibility of recognising the risk of ASD on the basis of ASD dimensions.