Ensuring grant efforts also meet community needs: Measure validation with specialized populations

While validated measures play an important role in meeting grant goals around screening, it is important for measures to be valid for the population being screened. One goal of Project ATTAIN (Access to Trauma-informed Treatment and Assessment for Neurodivergent and/or gender-expansive youth) is to increase trauma screening in conjunction with autism evaluations. The Child and Adolescent Trauma Screen (CATS) is a well-validated trauma screening measure, and our implementation team wanted to further validate it using a combination of cognitive interviews, pilot testing and an expert panel, so that it could be used with youth and young adults with intellectual and/or developmental disabilities. It was important that the method for validating the CATS was also appropriate for this population, leading to modifications in the cognitive interviewing process to align with best practices for working with autistic people (Nicolaidis et al., 2015; 2019). These efforts have been driven by our implementation team, and we will highlight the consultative evaluation work on this project that further strengthened the validation methods. Therefore, this presentation will review effective consultation and collaboration strategies between implementation and evaluation teams, the decisions leading to these validation efforts, the process (including evaluation consultation and how we have contributed to modification decisions), results, and important considerations for and challenges with doing this work.