Teaching Parents of Children with Autism to Perform Functional Assessments to Plan Interventions for Extremely Disruptive Behaviors

Abstract

Parents of children with autism often face unique challenges when attempting to understand and address their children's difficulty. Although professionals have used functional assessment to help design interventions that match the communicative intent of challenging behavior, parents often do not have this skill. This study investigated the ability of parents to learn the skills related to functional assessment and independently create interventions. The goals of the study were to (a) assess the ability of parents to use a manual in learning to perform a descriptive functional assessment, (b) identify whether the parents could generate functionally equivalent alternative behaviors, and (c) evaluate the parents' ability to independently teach the new behavior. Two families were assessed within controlled case studies. The results indicated that one family was immediately successful in utilizing functional assessment information to independently create an effective intervention, and the second family required a brief instructional session on prompting procedures to effectively implement the intervention.