Evaluating the Efficacy of Parent-focused Interventions for Autism: How do we Know what Will Work?

Abstract

Children with autism display significant learning, social and behavioural difficulties which impact on parents and teachers. Intensive child-focused behavioural interventions have proved to be an effective way of reducing these difficulties. Such programs are expensive to run and are currently not funded in New Zealand. One alternative way to provide early intervention at lower cost is to support parents as change agents or therapists for their child; however, little is known about the efficacy of such parent-focused programs. The NZ Ministry of Education currently resources a parent-focused program called EarlyBird. This program is delivered to parents in small groups over eight three-hour sessions with homework tasks included. The authors are currently evaluating the effectiveness of this program, measuring outcomes in terms of both parent learning and child behaviour. This paper describes the approach taken in the evaluation of EarlyBird and discusses methods and standards which can be used to evaluate parent-focused autism interventions.