ABSTRACT

Objective: The purpose of this study is to develop a tablet-based social assessment to evaluate the social development level of children with developmental disabilities (DD) and to study the pilot validity of each developed item. Methods: Constructed concepts related to social development for children with DD were established through a literature review. To establish the content validity, an expert panel was formed, and a Delphi survey was conducted. The digital assessment was developed through the process of designing an avatar and the logic of the running, development, and usability evaluation of the application. To verify the validity of the developed evaluation, the concurrent and discriminant validity were investigated. To verify the concurrent validity, the Korean version of the Social Communication Questionnaire (K-SCQ) and the Social Maturity Test (SMS) were conducted, and the correlation with the tablet-based social assessment was analyzed. To examine the discriminant validity, a Mann-Whitney analysis was conducted for 32 children with typical development (TD) and 16 children with DD. Results: The study results consisted of eight items in three major categories. Detailed items include following instructions, imitation, joint attention, pre-symbolic behavior, symbolic behavior, understanding rules, emotion perception, and perspective taking. As a result of a Delphi survey on the construct concept and task relevance of each item, the CVR of all items ranged from .8 to 1. The test scores between children with TD and DD were found to be significantly different in all items of tablet-based social assessment (-5.1, p = .000). In addition, it was found that there was a correlation between the K-SCQ and SMS scores and the tablet-based social assessment score (-.69, .57, p < .01). Conclusion: In this study, a tablet-based social assessment was developed, and the items and composition of the assessment were found to be valid. It is expected that the assessment developed in this study will help examine the level of social development for children with DD in clinical practice and the education field.