Perspectives of Canadian Rural Consultant Pediatricians on Diagnosing Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Qualitative Study
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Consultant pediatricians represent a potential resource for increasing autism spectrum disorder (ASD) diagnostic capacity; however, little is known about how they perceive their roles in ASD diagnosis. OBJECTIVE: The objective of this study was to examine the perspectives of rural consultant pediatricians regarding their perceived roles, facilitators, and barriers in ASD diagnosis. METHODS: We performed a qualitative study using thematic analysis. Consultant pediatricians from 3 small-sized and medium-sized Ontario communities were recruited. Semistructured interviews were conducted, transcribed, coded, and analyzed. RESULTS: Fourteen pediatricians participated in this study. Participants all considered ASD diagnosis to be in their scope of practice. The major theme identified was the process of diagnosing ASD, which occurred in 3 stages: preassessment (gathering information before the first clinic visit), diagnosis, and service access. All these stages are influenced by ecological factors consisting of characteristics of the child, family, individual physician, pediatric group practice, and the broader system of ASD care. CONCLUSION: Consultant pediatricians practicing in nonurban Ontario communities see ASD diagnosis as part of their scope of practice and collaboratively work within groups to address the needs of their communities. Strategies aimed at increasing diagnostic capacity should target salaried group practices and improve the efficiency of assessments through preclinic information gathering.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".