German Adaptation and Psychometric Evaluation of the Conversation Questionnaire

Background: The Conversation Questionnaire (CQ) assesses everyday conversational difficulties through items developed with autistic adults. We translated the CQ into German and examined whether its psychometric properties reproduced the original findings.Methods: Translation, author consultation, and cognitive debriefing with 15 self-reported autistic adults preceded validation in 185 native German-speaking adults. Participants reported an autism diagnosis (diagnosed), suspected or self-identified autism (suspected), or neither. We reanalyzed the original data (n = 266) to provide comparable benchmarks. We approximated the original broader cognitive-ability comparison with nonverbal matrix reasoning and extended validation to the recall of childhood coordination difficulties.Results: Item response theory modeling closely reproduced two dimensions: difficulty knowing what to say (15 items) and misunderstandings or behaviors affecting conversation (21 items). Only two of 36 items showed shifted loadings, while reliability remained high for both dimensions (.94 and .90, respectively). As in the reanalyzed original data, both dimensions distinguished the diagnosed and neither groups. The suspected group had intermediate average scores, with overlapping individual scores across groups. Correlations with the CQ’s Core Language Difficulties and Negative Interaction Style control subscales were stronger for the second dimension, while correlations with reasoning performance were near zero. Extending the original validation, both dimensions correlated strongly with recalled childhood coordination difficulties (r = .64–.71).Conclusion: These findings support the German CQ as a reliable, community-informed measure for characterizing conversational experiences among autistic and non-autistic German-speaking adults. Our findings also connect conversational experiences to childhood coordination abilities, showing the questionnaire’s relevance to broader neurodevelopmental research.