Association for Behavior Analysis International

This symposium includes three papers two of which evaluate interventions for efficiently teaching safety skills to children with developmental disabilities. Miltenberger, Novotny, Maxfield, and Baruni evaluated video self-modeling with children with autism and preliminary data show the procedure is effective. Orner, Miltenberger, and Maxfield evaluated small scale simulation training with kids with autism and found it effective for only one of three children. Lastly, Maxfield, Park, and Blair discuss the results of their meta-analysis on 26 single subject design studies on safety skills interventions for individuals with intellectual disabilities.

BCBA and BCaBA

We investigated a variation of video modeling, video self-modeling (VSM), for training firearm safety skills. The participants were prompted through the individual steps which was compiled to create the video where the participants would watch themselves engage in the appropriate safety skills. The participants were assessed following the creation of the video to ensure the skill was not learned from the creation of the video. Three children diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder between the ages of 7 and 13-years-old were recruited for this study. The participants were required to not touch the firearm, leave the room, and tell an adult. The VSM was effective for two of the participants and the skill maintained at a 1 and a 2-month follow-up. One participant required in situ training before engaging in all the safety skills correctly. This study is the first demonstration of video self-modeling for firearm safety skills.

Every year children are unintentionally injured or killed due to finding an unattended firearm. Although research evaluating various approaches to teach safety skills shows that behavioral skills training and in situ training are effective, limited research exists evaluating small-scale simulation training in teaching safety skills to children. Furthermore, there is no research evaluating this approach with children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). This study evaluated the effectiveness of small-scale simulation training in teaching firearm safety to 5 to 6-year-old children with ASD. Simulation training was effective for one participant, in situ training was necessary for one participant, and an incentive was required for the third participant to demonstrate the safety skills.

This study provides the results of a meta-analysis of 26 single subject design studies on safety skills interventions for individuals with intellectual disabilities. Results indicate that individuals who have mild to moderate ID, particularly school-age children, have benefited most from the safety skills interventions, and that that the interventions have demonstrated low-to-large effect sizes across safety skills (e.g., abduction prevention, fire safety, first aids, daily living safety, pedestrian safety skills). The behavioral skills training (BST) with and without additional components was the most commonly used safety skills intervention for individuals with ID; however, BST alone demonstrated a larger effect than BST with additional components, and video modeling had the largest treatment effect of all intervention types. Outcomes for abduction prevention skills were larger than those of other safety skills. Implications for practice and future research are discussed in the following areas: implementer, dose of intervention, treatment fidelity, and social validity.