Havdahl et al.'s (2023) Norwegian Mother, Father and Child Cohort Study (MoBa) skill loss study stands out for their creative consideration of scale items to gain a better understanding of skill loss/regression. This commentary outlines how the MoBa team continues to challenge the field by conducting "basic" measurement analyses with their public health longitudinal population data. Their creative use of items, validity-oriented analyses, and transparent reporting of item correlations emulates early-stage scale development in psychometric research, and sets the stage for considering how psychometricians and epidemiologists might more directly work with each other to improve early autism identification research.
Keywords: Autism spectrum disorders; epidemiology; psychometrics.
© 2023 Association for Child and Adolescent Mental Health.