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Conducting Behavioral Research with Children Attending Nonbehavioral Intervention Programs for Autism: the Case of Lebanon

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Fig. 1

Notes

  1. Cited with permission of the New York State Department of Health.

  2. Under the Facebook group “ALI for ABA Autism Lebanon.”

  3. I am indebted to Ms. Camelia Harb for assisting with tedious aspects of this review of the 112 JABA articles.

  4. According to International Monetary Fund (2012).

  5. The fourth student participated for only two and a half months, as his family relocated to another country. His participation is not included here.

  6. Ava’s participation ended simultaneously with the ending of the academic year, after which she moved to a new school.

  7. With Alan, one could see an improvement and subsequent stability in baseline performance starting with the fifth baseline session. The observed increase in target behavior might have been the result of reinforcement for engaging in appropriate attending behavior (especially targeting echolalia) that Alan received during the two prebaseline sessions and the first few sessions in baseline. This was reflected in Alan’s baseline performance, as his scores on completion improved as a function of appropriate attending.

  8. Thanks are due to an anonymous reviewer for pointing out the significance of this contribution.

  9. Thanks are due to an anonymous reviewer for suggesting that this model be adopted here.

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Acknowledgments

This research was funded in part by a grant from the University Research Board at the American University of Beirut. I am indebted to Mrs. Arwa El-Amine Halawi for generously securing the premises on which the study was conducted, to the children and their families for their participation and interest, and to Dr. Nadiya Slobodenyuk and Theresa Fiani for reviewing an earlier version of the manuscript. I am also very grateful for the students and colleagues who expressed an interest in this study, especially for those who obtained interobserver-agreement data and for Rita Obeid who obtained procedural-reliability data as well. Last but not least, I owe special, heartfelt thanks to Roger Daou for his great support throughout this project.

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The author declares that she has no conflict of interest.

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Daou, N. Conducting Behavioral Research with Children Attending Nonbehavioral Intervention Programs for Autism: the Case of Lebanon. Behav Analysis Practice 7, 78–90 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40617-014-0017-0

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