New Persian-Language Scale Reveals How Gender and Contact Shape Autism Attitudes in Iran

A psychometric study conducted in western Iran has delivered a rigorously validated Persian-language instrument for measuring how a society perceives autism, and its findings carry a message that extends far beyond translation. Researchers at the University of Kurdistan and Allameh Tabataba’i University tested the Societal Attitudes Towards Autism (SATA) scale among 413 university students in Sanandaj during the 2024–2025 academic year, and their results, published in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, show that a carefully trimmed 13-item version of the scale performs with excellent statistical fit and reliability in a cultural context where autism stigma remains a serious barrier to inclusion. Just as importantly, the data reveal two powerful predictors of positive attitudes: being a woman, and having personal contact with autistic individuals.

The SATA scale was originally developed by Flood, Bulgrin, and Morgan in 2013 as a tool to capture public perceptions of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a prevalent neurodevelopmental condition characterized by differences in social communication and restricted or repetitive patterns of behavior and interest. Unlike instruments aimed at clinicians or teachers, the SATA was designed to probe the attitudes of ordinary members of society, making it uniquely suited to studying the stigma that surrounds autism in everyday life. Stigma is not a cosmetic problem. Decades of research, including work summarized in the grand challenges of global mental health published in Nature, have documented that social stigma attached to mental and neurodevelopmental conditions delays diagnosis, discourages families from seeking services, and degrades the mental health of affected individuals and their caregivers.

For autistic people and their families, the consequences of negative societal attitudes are concrete and measurable. Systematic reviews have catalogued experiences of bullying, exclusion, concealment, and camouflaging among autistic adults, along with affiliate stigma, the internalized shame that family members absorb from their communities. In Iran specifically, prior studies have found gaps in public awareness of autism and documented stigma-related barriers within the mental health system itself. Yet measuring attitudes accurately requires more than goodwill; it requires an instrument that behaves statistically the same way in Persian as it does in the language and culture where it was born. That is precisely the problem the new study set out to solve.

The research team, led by Maryam Salamat with Parviz Fadakar Gabalou and Mohammad Rostami, conducted a cross-sectional psychometric study in which participants completed both the translated SATA scale and the Compassion Scale, a validated measure of compassion for others. The translation and adaptation followed established cross-cultural procedures, and content validity was evaluated using quantitative methods rooted in Lawshe’s classic approach to content validity assessment. Data were analyzed with SPSS 25 and R 4.3.3, combining classical statistical software with the modern open-source environment favored for structural equation modeling.

The centerpiece of the analysis was confirmatory factor analysis, a technique that tests whether the pattern of correlations among questionnaire items matches the structure predicted by theory. In the original English SATA, a defined set of items captures societal attitudes toward autism as a coherent construct. The Persian data told a slightly different story: three items, specifically items 5, 11, and 12, did not cohere with the rest and were removed. What remained was a 13-item Persian version whose confirmatory factor model demonstrated excellent fit to the data. In practical terms, excellent fit means the observed responses can be described by the hypothesized attitude structure without substantial residual mismatch, giving researchers confidence that the scale measures the same underlying construct in Iranian samples.

Reliability, the second pillar of psychometric soundness, was also confirmed. The researchers reported good internal consistency, meaning the items of the scale correlate with one another strongly enough that the total score provides a dependable summary of a respondent’s attitude. The team paid attention to modern methodological debates in reliability estimation, drawing on the literature arguing for omega coefficients over the traditional Cronbach’s alpha where appropriate, a detail that reflects the increasing statistical sophistication of cross-cultural validation studies. A scale that is unreliable cannot detect real differences between groups, no matter how elegant its theory, so this result is foundational for every future use of the Persian SATA.

Convergent validity was established through a positive correlation with the Compassion Scale. This is a theoretically meaningful link: compassion, defined as the sensitivity to suffering combined with the motivation to alleviate it, has been shown in prior research to relate to reduced negative outgroup attitudes. Studies of compassion-focused interventions and of compassion-based approaches to reducing mental illness stigma suggested that people higher in trait compassion should hold more accepting views of autistic people, and the positive association observed in the Iranian sample confirms that the SATA is capturing genuine attitude variance rather than statistical noise. The correlation also hints at a possible intervention pathway, since compassion can be cultivated through training.

The demographic findings are where the study becomes genuinely striking for a general audience. Women reported significantly more positive attitudes toward autism than men. This pattern echoes a broad body of research on gender and empathy, including neuroscience reviews documenting reliable sex-related differences in empathic responding, as well as studies of gendered stereotypes showing that socialization into caregiving norms shapes how people respond to vulnerability. Meanwhile, attitudes also varied systematically by the level of contact participants had with autistic individuals. This result is a direct real-world confirmation of the contact hypothesis, the intergroup theory first articulated by Gordon Allport in 1954 and confirmed in a landmark meta-analysis by Pettigrew and Tropp: under appropriate conditions, direct contact with members of a stigmatized group reduces prejudice.

The implications for Iran and for other low- and middle-income countries are substantial. Autism prevalence estimates worldwide have risen with broadened diagnostic criteria and improved recognition, and the World Health Organization now emphasizes autism as a global public health priority. Yet diagnostic and support infrastructure lags far behind in many regions, and stigma compounds the shortfall by deterring families from early screening and intervention. Iranian studies have documented late diagnoses, limited public knowledge, and caregiver stigma, including among parents who report reduced quality of life linked to affiliate stigma. A validated Persian SATA gives Iranian researchers, universities, and health planners a dependable yardstick for the first time to measure where attitudes stand, to identify which populations hold the most stigmatizing views, and to evaluate whether campaigns and curricula actually change minds.

The authors’ conclusion points squarely at targeted educational and experiential interventions, and the international evidence supports that direction. Online training programs for college students have been shown to increase knowledge of autism and decrease stigma, and brief educational interventions have improved children’s behavioral intentions toward autistic peers. Because the new study found that both gender and contact predict attitudes, the most efficient programs may combine factual education with structured opportunities for meaningful interaction with autistic people, rather than relying on information alone. University campuses, where future teachers, nurses, psychologists, and engineers form their lifelong social attitudes, are an ideal setting for such work. With a psychometrically sound 13-item Persian SATA now available, Iranian institutions can finally measure their progress with confidence, and researchers across the Persian-speaking world gain a tool whose statistical credentials have been tested against the demanding standards of modern confirmatory factor analysis.

Subject of Research: Validation of the Persian Societal Attitudes Towards Autism scale and its associations with gender, contact, and compassion among Iranian university students

Article Title: Properties of the Persian Version of the Societal Attitudes Towards Autism (SATA) Scale Among Iranian University Students

Article References: Properties of the Persian Version of the Societal Attitudes Towards Autism (SATA) Scale Among Iranian University Students. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-026-07473-3

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s10803-026-07473-3

Keywords: autism spectrum disorder, SATA scale, psychometric validation, social stigma, Iranian university students, confirmatory factor analysis, compassion, gender differences, intergroup contact, cross-cultural adaptation, internal consistency, convergent validity