ASD Home Situation Questionnaire

The HSQ-ASD is a simple but useful checklist for completion by a parent/carer. It identifies specific problem behaviours and/or situations for a child at home from the parent’s perspective. The level of severity ratings help identify priorities for intervention, and it can be used repeatedly as a monitoring tool for evaluation of any changes.

The checklist is qualitative in nature, without age or gender standardisation, and is suitable from age 5 to early teen years.

The factor structure by Chowdbury et al (2016) identifies 12 items closely associated with Social Inflexibility. Some of these are typical/common areas of difficulty for children with ASD. The checklist can thus be employed as part of an initial ASD diagnostic battery, and later as a “repeat measure “ monitoring tool by a psychologist or other education/health professional.

The instrument can also be useful for other children with problematic behaviour, either due to ADHD/ADD, immaturity, recurring school failure, disrupted family dynamics, or parenting difficulties. It may again be used repeatedly as a monitoring tool.

The original checklists, devised by Barkley and Edelbrock (1987), featured versions for both parents and teachers, but lacked the current factor structure.