The literature and the results of our previous finding periods have supported the position that parent training is an extremely effective approach to the treatment of autism. It is fast, economical, and produces relatively broad treatment changes. During our research program our work has been concerned with identifying specific variables related to the best-practice parent training and developing an improved program designed to address these variables. Accordingly, our research has assured a progressive direction in the development of a parent training treatment delivery package that is optimal for the child and for the family. In our previous research we have typically compared one type of treatment to another type of treatment. Looking back at our efforts in this area we now feel we have a substantial corpus of data both comprehensive in scope and rich in detail; and based on our pilot studies and preliminary investigations we believe that careful analyses of these data now allow us to specify several variables important for the purpose of developing """"""""individualized"""""""" treatments for children with autism and their parents. Our data indicate that although we have consistently found one standard type of treatment to be more beneficial overall than another standard type of treatment, each individual treatment contains aspects that are very powerful for specific purposes. In fact, our data suggest that a combination of these treatment procedures, individualized based on child, family and target behavior characteristics will be far superior than implementing one type of treatment for all children as if they were all the same. Because of the large amount of heterogeneity in child and parent characteristics seen in the area of autism it is becoming abundantly clear that individualized treatment will be greatly superior to a standard package. We hypothesize that this type of treatment will significantly improve the treatment of autism, with respect to both direct measures of child behavior and with respect to measures of overall family functioning. We thus propose to carefully compare tow treatment conditions. Our control condition will be our current best-practice parent training package (the Self-Management condition, now called the Standard Package or SP condition). Our experimental condition will be one in which treatment will be """"""""individualized"""""""" for each family in that the specifies of the treatment plan will be dictated by the characteristics of the child and of the family (the Individualized Package or IP condition).

Agency
National Institute of Health (NIH)
Institute
National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)
Type
Unknown (R10)
Project #
2R10MH039434-10A2
Application #
2033619
Study Section
Child Psychopathology and Treatment Review Committee (CPT)
Project Start
1984-09-01
Project End
2001-03-31
Budget Start
1997-04-01
Budget End
1998-03-31
Support Year
10
Fiscal Year
1997
Total Cost
Indirect Cost
Name
University of California San Diego
Department
Psychology
Type
Schools of Arts and Sciences
DUNS #
077758407
City
La Jolla
State
CA
Country
United States
Zip Code
92093
Schreibman, Laura; Stahmer, Aubyn C (2014) A randomized trial comparison of the effects of verbal and pictorial naturalistic communication strategies on spoken language for young children with autism. J Autism Dev Disord 44:1244-51
Cunningham, Allison B (2012) Measuring change in social interaction skills of young children with autism. J Autism Dev Disord 42:593-605
Schreibman, Laura; Stahmer, Aubyn C; Barlett, Valerie Cestone et al. (2009) Brief Report: Toward Refinement of a Predictive Behavioral Profile for Treatment Outcome in Children with Autism. Res Autism Spectr Disord 3:163-172