Parental Beliefs About Causes of Autism Spectrum Disorder: An Investigation of a Research Measure Using Principal Component Analysis

•We studied the IPQ-R-ASD Cause scale structure to better understand parents’ causal beliefs about autism.•Parents were more certain about what does not cause ASD rather than what does cause it.•Six causal belief factors emerged, explaining approximately 61 % of the variance in item scores.•The six factors: Personal Attributions, Parental Risk, Environmental Risk, Utero/Birth Stress, Biophysiological, and Metaphysical.•Understanding causal beliefs could help better support families’ treatment selection and implementation, and health-related decisions.