Development and validation of a Japanese version of the Sensory Experience Questionnaire (SEQ) 3.0: Structural differences of sensory features across autistic children

People with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often have atypical sensory experiences. For both research and clinical purposes, tools that measure sensory features in ASD are valuable; however, a gold-standard tool does not yet exist. The Sensory Experience Questionnaire (SEQ) 3.0 is a well-established caregiver-/parent-report questionnaire for children with ASD and other neurodevelopmental disorders. This study aimed to develop and psychometrically validate the Japanese version of the SEQ 3.0 (SEQ-J). After validation, we examined the differences in sensory response patterns among children with ASD, those with other neurodevelopmental conditions, and typically developing (TD) children to determine whether the SEQ assesses ASD-specific sensory features. We recruited 154 children with ASD (44 with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder [ADHD] and 66 with other conditions) and 156 TD children, aged 6 to 12 years. Confirmatory factor analyses revealed an acceptable model fit for four content factors (sensory hyper- and hyporesponsiveness, sensory interests, repetitive and seeking behaviors, and enhanced perception) and six method factors (five sensory modalities and social context) in both children with and without ASD. Receiver operator characteristic (ROC) analyses showed that SEQ factors, except for enhanced perception, demonstrated good classification performance between ASD and TD groups. However, ROC analyses comparing children with ASD to those with comorbid neurodevelopmental disorders did not show satisfactory performance. We performed representational similarity analyses (RSAs) on all ten SEQ factors, comparing both between- and within-group data. The RSAs revealed no difference in within-group similarities between the ASD and ADHD groups, but a significant difference in the overall configuration of scores between diagnostic groups compared to other group combinations. These findings support the psychometric validity of the SEQ-J for measuring sensory response patterns specific to children with ASD. Additionally, the structural configuration of SEQ subscores may be useful for investigating sensory features across diagnostic conditions, including ASD.