Honors Projects

Abstract

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) can experience significant difficulty and psychosocial toll as a result of their impairments in social communication. Specifically for adults, this can have a negative effect on relationships and vocational stability. However, there is a lack of effective intervention for adults with ASD to assist in learning these social conventions. Video modeling is an intervention that has potential to help these individuals learn to be successful in social problem-solving situations. A pilot feasibility study (Hewitt & Kelliher, n.d.) was conducted to investigate the intervention of video modeling for adults with ASD. Coding was then necessary in order to assess treatment efficacy. This exploratory feasibility study was not designed with a priori outcome measures, therefore, the present work undertook to develop measures that could be valid and reliable to measure change in response to social communication intervention, and that could be applied in the future for other studies. This project addresses the following questions: 1) What outcome measures can be determined to measure the pragmatic goals of individuals with ASD, and to be applied reliably and validly to other social communication interventions? And 2) How does the participants’ performance of these pragmatic skills compare to the models’ performance? Findings include the developed coding measures for each participant, and comparison between participant and model performance. In addition, this paper presents a qualitative discussion of other various aspects of the video modeling intervention bearing on feasibility and measurement issues. Findings from this work may ultimately assist clinicians in designing video modeling to best meet the needs of each individual client.

Department

Communication Sciences and Disorders

Major

Communication Sciences and Disorders

First Advisor

Lynne Hewitt, PH.D., CCC-SLP

First Advisor Department

Communication Sciences and Disorders

Second Advisor

Brooks Vostal, PH.D.

Second Advisor Department

School of Intervention Services

Publication Date

Winter 12-11-2016

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