Evaluating the Efficacy and Social Validity of a Culturally Adapted Training Program for Parents and Service Providers in India
A culturally tuned BST weekend shot FBA and FCT fidelity up for Chennai parents and pros.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Sivaraman and her team ran a short parent and professional class in Chennai, India.
They taught ten people how to do a quick FBA, use extinction, and start FCT.
The class used local stories, Tamil examples, and Indian family values.
Skills were tracked in a multiple-baseline design to see if the training stuck.
What they found
Every adult learned to run the steps correctly and kept the skills later.
Parents said the tools felt useful and respectful of their culture.
The study shows a brief, local-flavor BST package can travel to South Asia.
How this fits with other research
Vargas Londono et al. (2024) saw the same boost when they switched BST to Spanish for Latino caregivers.
Both papers are conceptual replications: speak the family’s language and culture, skills rise.
Gormley et al. (2019) first proved BST lifts staff knowledge in Irish ID services; Sivaramen extends that idea to Indian parents, widening the map.
Shin et al. (2021) used plain BST to teach parents DTT; here the content is FBA and FCT, but the fidelity jump looks the same.
Why it matters
You can copy the Chennai recipe anywhere. Swap in local stories, food examples, and respectful phrases. Keep the four BST steps: tell, show, practice, feedback. One Saturday workshop plus a home visit may be enough to get parents running FCT with clean data.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
In regions such as India, where one-to-one behavior-analytic intervention is not easily accessible, parents and service providers may advocate for children with disabilities better if they have foundational training in behavioral approaches to problem behavior. The purpose of this study was to evaluate a culturally adapted training delivered in an underresourced region of India. Ten parents and professionals from Chennai completed the training, and the researchers evaluated its effects using a multiple-baseline design. Participants showed improvements in correct responses on a structured form designed to capture skills involved in function-based assessment and intervention, as well as the fidelity of implementation of extinction and functional communication training. Moreover, participants rated the acceptability of training highly on measures of social validity. Guidelines for the education of parents and service providers in underresourced areas outside of the United States are discussed. The online version of this article (10.1007/s40617-020-00489-w) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Behavior Analysis in Practice, 2020 · doi:10.1007/s40617-020-00489-w