Evaluating facilitated communications of people with developmental disabilities.
Facilitated communication failed every validity check—zero participants labeled objects correctly when facilitators were blinded.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team tested facilitated communication with adults who had autism or intellectual disability.
A helper held the person’s hand while they typed answers to simple questions.
The researchers hid objects from the helper so only the client knew what to name.
What they found
No one typed the right name when the helper could not see the object.
Every answer matched what the helper saw, not what the client saw.
The study showed the helper was guiding the typing, not the client.
How this fits with other research
Alsop et al. (1995) ran the same kind of test and got the same zero-score result.
Together the two papers form a clean replication: FC fails every blinded trial.
Richman et al. (2001) faced the same problem—severe motor limits can hide real skills—so they built switch systems that let clients answer without adult touch.
Their work shows you can test non-verbal people fairly; you just can’t use hand-over-hand methods.
Why it matters
If a family asks you to support FC, show them these data instead of saying “it doesn’t work.”
Use autonomous response modes—eye gaze, switches, or speech devices—that remove facilitator influence and give clients true voice.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
A quasi-experimental message-passing procedure was used to assess the validity of the facilitated communication (FC) by people with autism and mental retardation or with mental retardation. The 23 participants were classified as having intellectual skills within the range of severe to profound mental retardation. Message-passing consisted of showing and verbally labeling a picture of a familiar object with the facilitator absent, and subsequent facilitation to generate a label or description of the object. Three-trial blocks were conducted with each participant on two different days. Blocks were conducted in the participants' normal FC setting, with their facilitators of choice, and no special apparatus was used. No participant was able to accurately label or describe the object shown to them with facilitation. Possible reasons for findings set forth by proponents of FC and findings from the emerging quantitative literature on FC are considered.
Research in developmental disabilities, 1993 · doi:10.1016/0891-4222(93)90020-k