Why are only some children with autism spectrum disorder misclassified by the social communication questionnaire? An empirical investigation of individual differences in sensitivity and specificity in a clinic-referred sample

Table 1 Prediction of ASD status based on Social Communication Questionnaire (SCQ)

SCQ cut-off	AUC	Classification^a	Sensitivity	Specificity	PPV	NPV
All (N = 187)
≥ 11	0.586		0.857	0.315	0.755	0.472
≥ 15	0.605	Poor	0.677	0.593	0.804	0.427
≥ 20	0.583		0.406	0.759	0.806	0.312
Gender
Males (N = 128)
≥ 11	0.539		0.838	0.241	0.753	0.350
≥ 15	0.631	Poor	0.675	0.586	0.818	0.395
≥ 20	0.597		0.400	0.793	0.842	0.324
Females (N = 59)
≥ 11	0.612	Poor	0.867	0.357	0.591	0.714
≥ 15	0.686	Poor	0.800	0.571	0.667	0.727
≥ 20	0.624	Poor	0.533	0.714	0.667	0.588
Age
Age 4–7 years (N = 84)
≥ 11	0.627	Poor	0.873	0.381	0.809	0.500
≥ 15	0.587		0.698	0.476	0.800	0.345
≥ 20	0.508		0.444	0.571	0.757	0.255
Age 8–11 years (N = 58)
≥ 11	0.553		0.833	0.272	0.652	0.500
≥ 15	0.638	Poor	0.639	0.636	0.742	0.519
≥ 20	0.649	Poor	0.389	0.909	0.875	0.476
Age 12 years and above (N = 45)
≥ 11	0.563		0.853	0.273	0.784	0.375
≥ 15	0.702	Fair	0.676	0.727	0.885	0.421
≥ 20	0.586		0.353	0.818	0.857	0.290

AUC the area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve, Sensitivity number of true positive/(true positive + false negative), Specificity number of true negative/(true negative + false positive), PPV positive predictive value (number of true positive/[true positive + false positive]), NPV negative predictive value (number of true negative/[true negative + false negative])
^aHanley and McNeil [36] suggested that a screener is a failure when an AUC is between 0.5 and 0.6, poor between 0.6 and 0.7, fair between 0.7 and 0.8, acceptable between 0.8 and 0.9, and perfect between 0.9 and 1.0

ISSN: 1866-1955