Information and Impression Regarding ASD Questionnaire Answered by Foreigners Living in Brazil

Abstract

Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) constitute a group of disorders characterized by changes present at early ages and manifesting in the areas of development of communication, behavior, and interpersonal relationship. Because ASD signiicantly afects communication and the social skills, all multicultural context needs to be beter investigated. There is an urgent need to understand the impact of migratory process, bilingual environment exposure on the language development of children with ASD. The present study aims to present the results of 657 foreign residents in Brazil that answered an online questionnaire to know the consolidated information about ASD. Participants from 23 countries responded to the survey. Bolivia and Argentina were the countries with the highest number of participants. The present study found that 100% of the participants have heard of autism. About 80.6% of the sample had a family member with autism. The sociodemographic diversity identiied in this study relects the sociocultural diversity present in Brazil, besides reinforcing the importance of considering this population when thinking about strategies and behaviors directed at individuals with ASD.

Social Communication and pragmatic skills of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder and Developmental Language Disorder

“…The analysis refers to 80 questionnaires, which means that only 40% of all the 200 questionnaires that were distributed were returned. This apparently low rate of return is similar to that obtained by other researchers with the similar procedures (15) .…”

“…Even knowing that social communicative abilities are more affected in children with ASD than in children with DLD it may be useful to use a specific tool to assess these differences and how they are associated with the data about children with typical language development (TLD) (14) . Previous studies have shown that parents can be reliable informants about the child's communicative abilities (15,16) . This information may help designing individual intervention programs based on specific profiles of abilities and inabilities.…”