Autism and Behavioral Assessment
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After providing a brief definition of the developmental disorder of autism, this paper examines the ways in which behavioral analysis or behavioral assessment has been used as a treatment strategy for this syndrome in children. Behavioral analysis sets aside questions of the complex and opaque etiology of this syndrome to attempt to provide effective treatment by altering the environment of autistic individuals so that they can in turn control their systems. This is a substantial shift in emphasis from earlier methods of treatment that attempted to directly affect or to control the autistic individual without altering environment stimuli in necessary ways. The literature on this form of treatment is reviewed to demonstrate that researchers believe such behavioral analyses are by far the most effective ways known currently to improve the quality of life for autistic individuals and to mainstream them. A number of scales have been developed to determine the effectiveness of such treatment strategies and the literature assessing these tests is reviewed here. Autism is one of the most severe and disruptive of childhood disorders. With both genetic and environmental elements at work in it, autism (which affects boys at least three times more often than girls and is found in all races and throughout the world) is a communicative disorder distinguished by a number of often dramatic and sometimes even violent symptoms. The autistic individual's be
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vioral Analysis
Behavioral analysis or assessment has as a core assumption the idea that the locus of behavioral problems in the autistic individual is external to the person. It follows from this assumption that the immediate causes of problems exhibited by the autistic individual (i.e. disordered behavior) are to be found in the environment and particularly in those events which affect the individual in systematic ways (Kozloff, 1983, p. 15). A number of assumptions about the appropriateness of various treatments arise from these initial assumptions, the primary one being that it is the environment that must be modified rather than the autistic individual. This again sets this method of treatment into contrast with traditional behavioral modification systems.
Kozloff (1983) summarizes this heteropathic model of treating autism by noting that behavioral models (unlike older "medical" homeopathic models) are: (1) concerned more with the present determinants of the child's disordered behavior and less with past and perhaps not irrelevant circumstances; and (2) consistent not with theories of causation but with theories of the nature of therapy, treatment, and especially behavioral change. Treatment of autistic children wit
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2217
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)
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