Using parents as therapists to evaluate appropriate behavior of their children: application to a tertiary diagnostic clinic.
Parents can run a clinic-based multielement assessment as well as professionals—teach them to flip between demand and attention conditions and watch which one sparks appropriate behavior.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team asked parents to run a short multielement test in a hospital clinic.
Parents switched between giving easy tasks, hard tasks, lots of attention, or no attention while watching their child.
Eight children with mixed diagnoses took part. Staff taught each parent the routine, then stepped back.
What they found
Seven of eight kids showed clear jumps in good behavior during one condition.
Parents hit every step of the plan and later said the tool was easy and fair.
The clinic got the same answers staff would have found, but parents supplied the data.
How this fits with other research
Adelson et al. (2024) later moved the same idea into homes. They trained parents as full behavior techs and saw big gains in daily living skills, showing the 1990 clinic trick can grow into a whole program.
Campos et al. (2020) is a close cousin. Parents again ran a multielement set-up, this time to thin reinforcement during FCT at home. Both papers prove moms and dads can handle rapid condition changes without a coach at their elbow.
Doçanay Bilgi (2020) used parents as experimenters in reading, not behavior. Parents picked the best fluency strategy after a brief test, echoing the 1990 parent-led assessment spirit in an academic slot.
Why it matters
You no longer need extra staff to pilot-test what makes a child work best. Train the parent in five minutes, let them run the four conditions, and watch the best one pop out. Use the winning condition right away in the same clinic visit or send it home as a bedtime routine. Saves staff hours, builds parent buy-in, and gives you a quick data sheet to stick in the report.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
We conducted a preliminary analysis of maintaining variables for children with conduct disorders in an outpatient clinic. Eight children of normal intelligence between the ages of 4 and 9 years were evaluated during 90-min sessions. The children's parents conducted the assessments by varying task demands (easy and difficult) and parental attention (attention and no attention) within a multielement design. The assessment focused on appropriate child behavior and was conducted to formulate hypotheses regarding maintaining contingencies. Results demonstrated that the children's appropriate behavior varied across assessment conditions and, for 7 of the 8 children, occurred at a higher rate during one condition than during other conditions. In addition, treatment integrity data demonstrated that parents were able to implement the procedures as intended. The recommended treatments were rated as being both effective and acceptable to parents for up to 6 months following the evaluation. Our results extend previous studies of functional analytic procedures conducted by trained experimenters with severely handicapped children in more controlled settings.
Journal of applied behavior analysis, 1990 · doi:10.1901/jaba.1990.23-285