Video modelling and behaviour analysis: promoting social skills in children with autism

Abstract

Peer relations serve many important functions in children's development. In autism, however, reciprocity of social exchange is missing and this has a devastating effect on the skill of relating. Recently video modelling has been regarded as an effective procedure that may offer some help. This thesis describes and evaluates a video modelling procedure across six different experiments. Experiment 1 investigated the general notion of promoting social skills in children with autism. Results revealed that video modelling can enhance both social initiation and reciprocal interaction. Experiment 2 expanded on this finding and demonstrated that video modelling can be an effective procedure for establishing generalised responding of target behaviours. Using more complex skills, Experiment 3 demonstrated that video modelling can build a sequence of different behaviours when these belong to the same response class. Data from Experiment 4 replicated previous findings and also demonstrated that video modelling can be a successful medium for transferring stimulus control, thus providing evidence that it can be used in any natural environment. Based primarily on the results of Experiment 3, Experiments 5 and 6 showed that video modelling can also be effective in building a sequence of behaviours even when these belong to different response classes. In addition, results suggest that such sequences of behaviour can be imitated by children with autism when a history of a limited number of behaviours has been established. In all of the experiments, aspects of environmental contingencies were analysed to determine the effective components of video modelling, independently of the behavioural characteristics of the children and in the absence of any experimenter-implemented consequences or prompts. Also, in all experiments, data revealed that all competing behaviours like disruptive or self-stimulatory reduced substantially as soon as social initiation and reciprocal interaction occurred; behaviour gains in the children generalised across stimuli, settings, and peers and maintained after one-, two-, or three month follow-up periods. Results generally are discussed in terms of the potential of using video modelling to enhance the acquisition of lengthy response chains, such as activity schedules.

Date of Award	Jun 2003
Original language	English