Caregiver Quick Reference Guide
This assignment requires you to pull together the work you did for the Units 2, 4, 6, and 8 assignments. The objective is to fully synthesize the material in layman’s terms so a caregiver or significant other could grasp it readily and use it as a quick reference guide. Your successful completion of the assignment will reflect your ability to condense all of the material that you have compiled for the course project to one or two pages.
Using the literature you have gathered and formative feedback received from your instructor, create your final assignment, in which you:
- Define the target behavior to be prioritized for intervention.
- Identify the social significance of the target behavior.
- Apply measurement, data display (graphing), and data-based decision-making skills to make changes in human behavior.
- Describe assessment results and interventions in language appropriate for caregivers and significant others.
- Evaluate key ABA concepts, principles, and methods to analyze and change target behaviors from research.
- Design function-based interventions that address response effort, practitioner skills, contextual fit, practicality, treatment acceptability, and administrative support.
Use the following subheadings to organize your paper and format them in APA style:
- Target Behavior.
- Measurement & Visual Display.
- Research.
- Intervention.
Here is the example of a friend paper you can use.
Target Behavior
Tantrum can be defined as the emotional outburst associated with emotional distress mostly characterized by screaming, crying, stubbornness, defiance, ranting, and in some cases violence. Tantrums are also referred to as hissy fits, fireworks, and blow-ups, to mention but a few (Carlson et al., 2016). Tantrums can reach a critical level which requires medical intervention of the patient. The people around the affected children including parents, teachers, and health care providers should be able to differentiate normal and abnormal tantrum behavior and seek the best management practices (Daniels, Mandleco, & Luthy, 2011). The social significance of the behavior is that it not socially acceptable because the child can hurt themselves or others, and also cause embarrassment to their parents.
Measurement and Visual Display
The nature of the study is qualitative, and there are various ways by which data can be collected. The parents and the teachers of the autistic child, whose tantrum-like behavior should be measured, should be given open-ended questionnaires which can either be electronic or hardcopy. The health care provider designing the questionnaires should make sure that it covers all the relevant aspects of the condition. The other measurement approach can be by observation which aims at monitoring the child during their daily activities. After gathering the information, it can be analyzed by validation, editing, and coding techniques. The data can be displayed by use of line graphs which can relate the amount of time the child displays tantrum-like behavior every day for a period of one week.
Research
If the data collected from the study shows signs of abnormal tantrum-like behavior, the parents are supposed to seek medical intervention for the child. The signs may be described by overt show of unpleasant behavior which is severe and disproportionate to the situation at hand. Mostly, tantrums which are seen after 5 years of age, and are displayed for episodes of more than 15 minutes, it is a sign that the condition requires medical intervention Some of the general interventions which can be embraced by the parents is by avoiding the triggers which cause the tantrums. Parents can also help the child reduce frustration by childproofing the home. Understanding children with autism requires a lot of patience from the parents (Daniels et al., 2011).
Intervention
One of the important intervention programs for the autistic children with tantrum-like behavior is by use of applied behavior analysis (ABA) which entails approaches like positive reinforcement which aims at encouraging the child in what they do, prompts which are used as gentle reminders to encourage change of behavior, and task analysis which aims at learning the child’s behavior other than correcting them (Peters-Scheffer, Didden, Korzilius, & Sturmey, 2011). The other intervention methods which can be used by health care practitioners include finding the explanation for the behavior, then the health history of the child, followed by physical examination, and lastly, suggestion of a referral or pharmacological intervention. The children should also be taught to express their emotions as they get older (Daniels et al., 2011).
