Remarks on "Cross-disciplinary Appraisal of Knowledge and Beliefs Regarding the Diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorders in India: A Cross-sectional Survey".

Jain et al.[1] reported a cross-disciplinary appraisal of knowledge and beliefs regarding the diagnosis of autistic spectrum disorders (ASD) in India. We have some comments on the objectives and methods of the study.

We believe that comparing knowledge about ASD across different groups of professionals is unwarranted. The three groups of professionals studied, clinical psychologists, speech therapists, and occupational therapists, by virtue of their training and expertise, could almost by definition be expected to have different levels of knowledge and would be expected to play different roles at different stages while managing ASD. Comparing knowledge across these three groups would therefore serve no scientifically useful purpose. It would have been more appropriate had the authors, for example, defined minimum thresholds of knowledge for each group of professionals and then studied their actual knowledge of the field. In this context, it should be noted that nobody can be expected to know everything.

The authors also reported modifying and adding to an existing instrument[2] without piloting the new instrument to understand its strengths, limitations, and psychometric properties.

Finally, the last paragraph of the Introduction contains a repetition for aims and objectives of the study. It would have been more meaningful for the authors to have instead stated primary and secondary objectives, with appropriate justification. The primary and secondary outcome measures should also have been stated and justified.[3]