A Preliminary Evaluation of Training Parents to Use Facilitative Strategies with Their Children with Profound Disabilities

Abstract

This article describes the effects of an intervention in which parents were taught to use facilitative strategies when interacting with their children with profound disabilities. The intervention consisted of reinforcing appropriate parent behavior as it was being observed by them on prerecorded videotapes, A multiple probe design across three subjects was used to assess the relationship between the intervention and participant behavior. Dependent measures included parent use of facilitative strategies, defined as the use of choice, elaboration, social games, and imitation. Child-dependent measures were defined as social and isolate behavior. The results indicated a functional relationship between the training parents received and their increased use of facilitative strategies within training and nontraining situations in two of the dyads. In two of the three subject dyads, parents' use of facilitative strategies appeared related to child's frequency of social behavior. Two of the parents reported positive differences in the quality of their interactions after the intervention. Early childhood special education professionals examined a set of the videotaped observations and rated posttraining tapes higher than baseline tapes on interaction quality for two of the three dyads.