Research

Parent-Infant Engaged: Extension Pilot Study to Culturally Diverse Populations in Los Angeles

This study aims to develop more culturally sensitive early screening tool to identify early risk markers of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) for ethnic minority infants in the general population. The First Years Inventory (FYI; Baranek et al., 2013) is a newly revised screener that has been normed from a large community sample (7000 infants between 8 and 16 months of age) in North Carolina. However, the majority of the participants from this North Carolina sample were English-speaking European Americans, thus normative data is not generalizable to other languages or ethnic groups in diverse urban communities, such as Los Angeles. The present research study will extend collection of normative data to include Spanish-speaking families, primarily of Hispanic/Latino background in the Greater Los Angeles area in order to identity if there is a need to improve the FYI to be more culturally sensitive and adaptive across diverse ethnic groups.