Adolescent Performance on the Awareness of Social Inference Test (TASIT)
Background
The Awareness of Social Inference Test (TASIT) was developed to assist in the clinical assessment of adults with traumatic brain injury who fail to understand social communication in everyday contexts. It has proven to be both reliable and sensitive to such problems. As an adult designed test it is unknown whether this test would also be suitable for adolescents. This study addressed this question.
Method
108 school students aged 13-17 participated in this study. The majority of students were from non-English speaking backgrounds including Asian, European and Island languages. In classroom groups they were administered Form A of TASIT, i.e. Part 1: Emotion Evaluation Part 2: Social Inference (Minimal, i.e. judging sincere and sarcastic remarks without context) and Part 3: Social Inference (Enriched, i.e. judging lies and sarcastic remarks with extra contextual information).
Results
The older students did better on Part 2 of TASIT but there was no correlation between age and either Part 1 or Part 3. In general, the adolescents did perform more poorly than adults, although the size of the difference was not great. There was a significant association between familiarity with English and performance on all parts of TASIT. Never-the-less, even students with less familiarity with English were able to understand and respond appropriately to the majority of the questions.
Conclusions
It would appear that TASIT may have a role in the assessment of adolescents with traumatic brain injury, provided adolescent norms are used for comparative purposes. While TASIT was developed using adult speakers and scripts, the items are competently interpreted, the majority of the time, by normal adolescents from a diverse range of cultural backgrounds.