The Role of Professional Training Experiences and Manualized Programs in ABA Providers’ Use of Parent Training With Children With Autism☆
Section snippets
Participants
Participants were recruited through the Behavior Analyst Certification Board (BACB) Registry, the national credentialing organization for ABA providers. A recruitment email was sent through the BACB mass email service to providers at the BCBA-D (doctoral), BCBA (master’s), and BCaBA (bachelor’s) levels across the United States, asking whether they would participate in an online study examining providers’ perspectives on parent training for clients with ASD. A second recruitment email was sent
Parent Training Extensiveness
Providers reported wide variation in their parent training use. The majority of providers reported that they had provided parent training to most (25%) or all (39%) of their clients with ASD at least once in the last 6 months. The majority of providers (53.2%) also reported providing one to two parent training sessions per month for an average client with ASD. Providers’ average rating for how frequently they used evidence-based strategies when providing parent training was 3.8 (SD = 0.74),
Discussion
ABA providers receive a number of different training experiences related to parent training for children with ASD, with in-service workshops, observation of colleagues, self-guided study, and supervision being the most common. The overall number of these training experiences was a significant predictor of the extensiveness of their parent training use. This result is consistent with the finding by Christon et al. (2015) that providers’ self-reported training in ASD-specific EBPs was related to
Conclusions
In sum, our data suggest that the amount of training that ABA providers receive related to parent training influences their use of this approach with their clients with ASD. In particular, providing coursework on evidence-based parent training strategies at the pre-service level, providing supervision regarding parent training, training providers in a specific parent training approach, and encouraging the use of manualized programs are likely to have the greatest impact on ABA providers’ use of
Conflict of Interest Statement
The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest.
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This work was supported by a Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan Foundation Student Award Program (003701.SAP) to the second author and a BP-ENDURE scholarship to the third author. We would like to thank the ABA providers who participated in this study.