Parental Beliefs About Causes of Autism Spectrum Disorder: An Investigation of a Research Measure Using Principal Component Analysis

Abstract

BackgroundParents’ perceptions about cause of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) influences their behaviors (e.g., treatment selection, vaccinations). The Revised Illness Perception Questionnaire for ASD (IPQ-R-ASD) offers a systematic way to measure parent parents’ perceptions of ASD cause, but further study is needed. MethodUsing principal component analysis (PCA), we investigated the factor structure of the IPQ-R-ASD Cause scale, which was administered online, in a sample of 326 North American parents (287 mothers [88 %], 39 fathers) raising children with confirmed ASD diagnoses. ResultsSix factors emerged on the Cause subscale and were labeled Personal Attributions, Parental Risk Factors, Environmental Risk Factors, Utero/Birth Stress, Biophysiological, and Metaphysical. Together, these factors accounted for a cumulative variance of 61.4 %. All items exceeded the minimum loading to be considered robust, and all but one loaded positively (i.e., “Will of God). ConclusionsUnderstanding parental perceptions about the cause of their children’s ASD may help researchers and clinicians understand important aspects of raising a child with ASD, such as stress and coping responses, treatment selection and implementation, or shared decision-making about service use. Since measurement of causal beliefs is an important initial step in this direction, the current study is helpful in establishing the viability of a measure that may extend this line of research and, ultimately, the instrument’s clinical utility.