Autism Spectrum Disorders: Barriers to Implementing Parent-Based Home Programs.

An exploratory survey to identify the barriers experienced by caregivers of children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) when implementing home programs (HP) was conducted with a newly developed questionnaire, 'barriers in the parent-based home program for ASD (BHPQ-ASD)' in English and Malayalam. The questionnaire has 25 items in Likert scale response format and underwent face validation and cognitive debriefing. It was administered to 50 caregivers of ASD children for factor extraction and reliability analysis. Seven questions under service provider-related barriers emerged to have good psychometric properties in the principal axis factoring method and were grouped to form the 'service provider-related BHPQ-ASD' scale, which has very good internal consistency (Cronbach alpha 0.903). In regression analysis, parents of children not receiving occupational therapy (OT) reported 6.6 times more barriers when compared to those undergoing OT (OR 6.6, CI 1.5-29.7, p = 0.014). BHPQ-ASD is a useful valid tool for detecting the barriers to implementing HPs.