Development of a support needs assessment scale for children and adolescents with intellectual disabilities

This paper focuses on the development of a scale for assessing support needs of children and adolescents with intellectual disabilities. This tool adheres to the most recent conception of intellectual disabilities and has been translated into Spanish following the international proposal initiated by the American Association of Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (AAIDD). The mam focus of this research is to analyze the psychometric characteristics of this scale within the Spanish context. So far, this tool has been administered to a pilot sample of 143 people (both children and adolescents) with intellectual disabilities and has been analyzed according to the framework of Item Response Theory (IRT), specifically taking into account the assumptions of the Rating Scale Model (RSM). The results show preliminary evidence of the reliability and validity of the scale, as well as the adequate adjustment of the data to the proposed model.