Preliminary effects of parent-implemented behavioural interventions for stereotypy: Brief report

Abstract

Altogether, our preliminary results support (a) the involvement of parents as behaviour change agents to reduce engagement in stereotypy and (b) the scheduling of regular, but infrequent (i.e. weekly to monthly), follow-up meetings to monitor the effects of behavioural interventions in outpatient and home-based service delivery models.

Parent‐implemented treatment for automatically maintained stereotypy

“…In addition, the caregiver has the opportunity to participate in the decision‐making process throughout the intervention implementation and thus may be more equipped to make changes if the effectiveness of the intervention diminishes over time. We trained Eleanor's father to implement the intervention using procedures similar to previous research (e.g., Lanovaz et al, ; Miles & Wilder, ; Tarbox et al, ; Wacker et al, ; Ward‐Horner & Sturmey, ). The high treatment fidelity throughout the treatment evaluation indicates that our training was effective.…”

“…Another potential limitation is that the researchers did not conduct the competing stimulus assessment until after the initial intervention failed. The initial intervention, without a competing stimulus, was introduced based on previous research, which demonstrated that caregiver‐implemented differential reinforcement was effective in decreasing vocal stereotypy in children with autism (Lanovaz et al, ). In addition, the researchers originally conceptualized the tablet as a single stimulus.…”

“…For example, of the 62 studies evaluating stereotypy interventions included in the review conducted by DiGennaro Reed et al (), none of the studies included parents as the sole implementer. To our knowledge, there have been four evaluations of parent‐implemented interventions to reduce stereotypy (Grahame et al, ; Lanovaz, Rapp, Maciw, Dorion, & Prégent‐Pelletier, ; Simpson, Swenson, & Thompson, ; Tarbox, Wallace, & Tarbox, ). Of those articles, the most common intervention components were prompting and reinforcement for appropriate behavior (Grahame et al; Lanovaz et al; Tarbox et al).…”

Evaluating Behavioral Skills Training as an Evidence-Based Practice When Training Parents to Intervene with Their Children

“…The 20 single subject studies primarily utilized multiple baseline or multiple probe designs (n = 18, 90%). Lanovaz et al (2016) utilized a multicomponent design, comparing three parents implementing a behavioral intervention package (e.g., prompting, reinforcement) to parents not implementing the treatment package to reduce stereotypy and challenging behavior for their children with autism. Jensen et al (2018) utilized an AB design with 20 parent participants to teach parents to accurately implement a time-out reinforcement protocol.…”

Parent treatment integrity across multiple components of a behavioral intervention

“…In general, although there is evidence that parents can implement behavioral interventions with high integrity, these most often do not involve multi‐component interventions (e.g., Gerow et al., 2018; Miles & Wilder, 2009; Seiverling et al., 2012). Within the limited number of studies that do include multi‐component interventions for the reduction of challenging behavior, neither treatment integrity for each component of the intervention is not reported nor do they investigate how parent treatment integrity is affected by the introduction of additional treatment components (e.g., Bailey & Blair, 2015; Lanovaz et al., 2016).…”