Evaluation of the French adaptation of the First Year Inventory (FYI) questionnaire by parents of children with standard or specialized medical follow-up

Behavioral signs of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) have been documented as early as 9 to 12 months of age, a period that also coincides with significant developmental change. Early identification of children who may need evaluation and support is therefore essential, and screening tools play a central role in making this possible. In this context, the First Year Inventory (FYI; Reznick et al., 2007) stands out as one of the few screening tools designed specifically for this age group. This parent-report questionnaire assesses infant behavior at around 12 months of age across 69 items organized into two domains. The first domain, Social-Communication, captures behaviors across four constructs: social orienting, receptive communication, social-affective engagement, imitation, and expressive communication. The second domain, Sensory-Regulatory, encompasses four constructs: sensory processing, regulatory patterns, reactivity, and repetitive behavior. Originally developed in English, the FYI has since been translated into several languages including Spanish, Italian, Korean, and Chinese, reflecting its growing international relevance. Yet no French version currently exists. Given the well-established need for culturally and linguistically appropriate assessment tools (Wallis & Pinto-Martin, 2008), developing a standard French version appears particularly relevant for both research and clinical practice in French-speaking contexts, and could further serve, if needed, as a foundation for regional adaptations in the French-speaking world, which includes countries on the five continents. The translation, adaptation and validation of a new language version require a rigorous methodology which comprise three distinct steps (Sousa & Rojjanasrirat, 2011): - The first step involves translation of the questionnaire, typically employing the forward-backward methodology. In this process, a qualified translator translates the document into the target language, after which a second qualified translator back-translates the text into the original language. The two versions are compared to ensure equivalence between the original and back-translated texts. This first step results in a preliminary version. - The second step is a pilot testing of the preliminary version, designed to assess the comprehensibility of the preliminary version within the target population. This phase identifies items that require clarification or adaptation. For example, items originally developed for an English-speaking context may not convey the same meaning in a French-speaking context. This second step produces a pre-final version. - The third step is the full psychometric testing phase of the pre-final version within the target population. This phase evaluates the questionnaire’s reliability, defined as the consistency and reproducibility of results, and validity, defined as the ability to measure the intended construct, in a larger sample of the target population. The preliminary French version of the FYI has already been completed by our team. The present study constitutes the pre-test phase, which aims to evaluate the comprehensibility of our translated version among French-speaking parents and to produce a pre-final version of the FYI in French. This study will also preliminarily examine whether questionnaire response patterns and FYI scores differ between parents of children with standard versus specialized medical follow-up. This would offer an early indication of the questionnaire’s ability to discriminate between children’s profiles, prior to a full psychometric validation phase. This study has been approved by a local ethical committee in France (n°CER-TP 2026-02-05).