INTERVENTIONS FOR
INTERVENTIONS FOR AUTISM SPECTRUM DISORDERS
Need for Evidenced-Based Interventions
Identifying effective medical and behavioral treatments for neurodevelopmental disorders should be based on a solid foundation of scientific evidence. This tradition of scientific investigation has long been a foundation of modern medicine, and the need for identifying evidence-based treatments has received increasing recognition in the field. In addition, as part of legislation under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB, 2002), the field of education also requires the use of “effective interventions” to support learning. These interventions can only be validated through “scientifically based research.” The call for the use of interventions that have proven their effectiveness is particularly important for the ASD community, which has long been plagued by the use of unsupported and often controversial interventions. In fact, it has been suggested that the uncritical use of unproven “miracle” interventions has encouraged unrealistic, implausible, and unhealthy expectations about treatment results and have ultimately impeded the progress of identifying effective interventions for children and adolescents with ASD (Simpson, 2005).
Identifying Effective Interventions
One major barrier to the adoption of evidenced-based practices for ASD is the lack of consensus on how to identify and evaluate scientifically valid and effective interventions. According to NCLB, “scientifically based research” is defined as “research that involves the application of rigorous, systematic, and objective procedures to obtain reliable and valid knowledge” (NCLB, 2002). For a practice to be judged as scientific, it must meet particular standards, reliably yield positive results, and survive a rigorous peer review process. In addition, scientifically based practices are validated by means of specific “gold standard” research designs that include random samples of subjects that are assigned to control and experimental groups or a series of replications of well-controlled studies using rigorous single-subject designs. However, the scientific method of validation has sometimes been criticized as being too narrow and as having a negative effect on ASD research because of the methodological restrictions that make this type of research difficult to conduct in many real-life settings. The following guidelines (Simpson, 2005) provide a balanced perspective for evaluating ASD interventions:
Just because a website or brochure lists an intervention as “evidence-based” or “research-based” does not make it true. It may take careful investigation to determine whether a treatment truly has been validated
