Autism Spectrum Disorder and screen time during lockdown

Abstract: this dataset contain data from a research conducted during the Italian lockdown due to COVID-19 (March-May 2020). Lockdown due to Covid-19 pandemic brought deep changes to the daily lives of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), greatly increasing their amount of time spent at home. Parents of children with ASD filled an online survey. A cohort of 243 parents of children with ASD (2-15 years old) completed an original online survey regarding the child’s screen time and the modification of the ASD symptomatology during lockdown to investigate the relationship between them. This data investigated the relation between ASD symptoms modification during lockdown and the amount of time spent with the screen by the children.

Methods: The data were analyzed with Pycharm (Python language). Descriptive and Spearman correlation statistics were computed on the original survey data. The variables expressed on a Likert scale were transformed into dichotomous variable in order to depict and highlight the effect of any improvements or worsen of child’s symptomatology, weakening the negative impact of a relatively low sample size on model accuracy; the time spent in the screen time activity done during lockdown were reparametrized as a percentage of time spent in a specific screen time activity over the total time spent in all screetime.