This study sheds insight into the unique, daily struggles of individuals with Asperger Syndrome (AS) as they transition into adulthood. The majority of research available regarding individuals diagnosed with AS focuses on childhood experiences. What happens when these individuals age out of high school? What are their experiences with becoming independent, successful adults? This study elicited qualitative data concerned with individual experience from seven participants between the ages of eighteen and thirty years old. Data were collected through three face-to-face and four email interviews. Data were analyzed to identify specific challenges of adult life. All participants expressed challenges in social interaction, as well as successfully coping with stress in the areas of employment, education, and relationships. Results of this study offer a deeper understanding of the individual challenges individuals experience in young adult life.

This study was conducted to examine professional development techniques for training special education teachers to implement discrete trial training with in the classroom environment. The purpose of this study was to determine if professional development regarding discrete trail training increases the fidelity with which teachers implement discrete trail training when providing instruction to students with autism spectrum disorder. Specifically, the study noted if professional development that included coaching in the classroom increased the fidelity with which teachers were able to implement discrete trail training. Further, this study examined the correlation between an improvement in the fidelity with which teachers implemented discrete trail training and positive student outcomes. Six studies were included in the present study. These studies found that following an initial presentation of information regarding discrete trail training with in the classroom coaching leads to an increase in teachers’ ability to implement discrete trail training with fidelity. An increase in teacher fidelity was found to correlate positively to an increase in positive student outcomes such as increased student learning and decreased negative student behaviors. The impact these improvements in teacher and student outcomes stand to have on issues such as teacher burnout, attrition, and self-efficacy are also discussed.

The understanding and treatment of challenging behaviors in individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder is paramount to enabling the success of behavioral therapy; an essential step in this process being the labeling of challenging behaviors demonstrated in therapy sessions. These manifestations differ across individuals and within individuals over time and thus, the appropriate classification of a challenging behavior when considering purely qualitative factors can be unclear. In this thesis we seek to add quantitative depth to this otherwise qualitative task of challenging behavior classification. We do so through the application of natural language processing techniques to behavioral descriptions extracted from the CARD Skills dataset. Specifically, we construct 3 sets of 50-dimensional document embeddings to represent the 1,917 recorded instances of challenging behaviors demonstrated in Applied Behavior Analysis therapy. These embeddings are learned through three processes: a TF-IDF weighted sum of Word2Vec embeddings, Doc2Vec embeddings which use hierarchical softmax as an output layer, and Doc2Vec which optimizes the original Doc2Vec architecture through Negative Sampling. Once created, these embeddings are initially used as input to a Support Vector Machine classifier to demonstrate the success of binary classification within this problem set. This preliminary exploration achieves promising classification accuracies ranging from 78.2-100% and establishes the separability of challenging behaviors given their neural embeddings. We next construct a multi-class classification model via a Gaussian Process Classifier fitted with Laplace approximation. This classification model, trained on an 80/20 stratified split of the seven most frequently occurring behaviors in the dataset, produces an accuracy of 82.7%. Through this exploration we demonstrate that the semantic queues derived from the language of challenging behavior descriptions, modeled using natural language processing techniques, can be successfully leveraged in classification architectures. This study represents the first of its kind, providing a proof of concept for the application of machine learning to the observations of challenging behaviors demonstrated in ASD with the ultimate goal of improving the efficacy of the behavioral treatments which intrinsically rely on the accurate identification of these behaviors.

Students with intellectual and other disabilities who age out of transition programs or graduate from high school may experience marginalization as young adults. There exists scant literature on the perceptions of parents about access to employment and services for their adult children with disabilities. The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore how parents perceived educational services, financial burdens, social isolation, and lack of access to employment for their children with intellectual and other disabilities. Critical disability theory and transformational theory constituted the study's conceptual framework. The research questions concerned how parents perceived access to services related to financial assistance, postsecondary education, employment, and vocational consultation. The design was a case study with a purposefully selected sample consisting of 5 parents from a Western U.S. state. Data sources included field notes, interviews, and artifacts. A field log, newspaper articles, and interview transcriptions were gathered, sorted, and categorized into themes. Results of the study revealed that employment gaps for adults with disabilities decreased with better knowledge about disability strengths, social capital, employer and employee diversity training, and competitive employment opportunities. A position paper was developed based on study findings, which was targeted to employers and included information on the reasons for a business to embrace diversity in the workplace. Business leaders' promotion of social enterprises that enable community inclusion and financial independence for people with disabilities may result in a positive paradigm shift towards equitable employment as a positive social change outcome.

The current study investigated types of social support needs through a number of domains reported by parents of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) along with the relationship of these needs to reported parental stress. Female participants (N = 35) in the South Central Kentucky region responded to a number of measures regarding perceptions of their current stress levels on the Parenting Stress Index - Short Form (PSI-SF) and their perceptions on social support needs through a modified version of the Family Needs Questionnaire (FNQ). The results indicated that there was a moderately strong correlation between social support needs and parental stress. For exploratory analyses, the results indicated that several social support domains significantly correlated with parental stress. Further research was recommended to explore the seven social support need domains used in the current study with ASD families.

Inledning: Svårigheterna som förekommer vid autismspektrumtillstånd påverkar individer och familjer i stor omfattning. Denna studie fokuserar på att förstå hur föräldrar uppfattar sin situation och hur de beskriver familjens behov av stöd och hjälp. Frågeställningar: Hur upplever föräldrar att relationerna och livet i familjen påverkas när en individ i familjen har funktionsnedsättningar inom autismspektrum? Hur beskriver föräldrar familjens behov av stöd och hjälp? Metod: I arbetet har kvalitativ metod använts. I studien har åtta föräldrar intervjuats. Intervjuerna analyserades enligt tematisk analys. Resultat: Tre teman framkom i analysen: diagnos - en sorg och en lättnad, energikrävande vardag samt ett kämpande för rätt hjälp och stöd. Diskussion: Föräldrarna beskriver att diagnosen, även om det också finns en sorg, medverkat till att öka förståelsen för barnet och barnets beteende. Det framkommer att funktionsnedsättningarna tar energi och tid, att skapandet av ett vardagligt liv blir som en omfattande och tidskrävande arbetsuppgift. Föräldrarna rapporterar i intervjuerna att de får kämpa hårt för att barnet ska få rätt stöd och hjälp. / Introduction: Autism-related disabilities have large effects on both individuals and families. This study focuses on how parents experience their situation and how they describe the family’s need for support and counceling. Research questions: How do the families experience the impact of autism on their relationships and their family life? How do the families describe their need of counceling and support? Method: In this study a qualitative methodology was used. Parents of five children/ young adults were interviewed. The interviews were analysed using thematic analysis. Results: Three themes emerged from the analysis: diagnosis – both a sadness and relief, energy consuming daily life and struggling to get the right counceling and support. Discussion: Parents describe that the diagnosis, although considered a sadness, also contributed to increase the understanding of the child and its behaviour. The disabilities of the child impact the family’s daily life and the daily life becomes an energy and time consuming task for the parents. Parents report that they have to struggle to get the right counceling and support.

Three preschoolers with limited or no verbal language were taught to request preferred objects using an adapted Picture Exchange Communication System (Bondy & Frost, 1998) and elements of peer mediated instruction and intervention (Neitzel, 2008) (PECS/PMII). These two interventions have been established as evidence based practices, but have not previously been taught and implemented by one adult and a preschool child in a preschool classroom. Same-aged peers were the communicative partners for the picture exchange. A teacher served as the facilitator of the exchanges. A multiple probe (days) across participants design was utilized to determine the effectiveness of the intervention. The percentage of successful exchanges/requests made by the target child using the adapted PECS/PMII method was evaluated to determine the effectiveness of the intervention when implemented by a same-aged peer. The target children not only made requests to the criterion level, two of the three increased their appropriate verbal responses. The same-aged peers were able to effectively implement the steps for PECS phase 1.

Background Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) have been reported to show socio-communicative impairments which are associated with impaired face perception and atypical gaze behaviour. Attending to faces and interpreting the important socio-communicative cues presented allows us to understand other’s cognitive states, emotions, wants and desires. This information enables successful social encounters and interactions to take place. Children with ASD not attending to these important social cues on the face may cause some of the socio-communicative impairments observed within this population. Examining how children with ASD attend to faces will enhance our understanding of their communicative impairments. Aim The present thesis therefore aimed to use eye-tracking methodology to examine attention allocation to faces for communicative cues in children with ASD. Method The first line of enquiry examined how children with ASD (n = 21; age = 13y7m) attended to faces presented within their picture communication systems compared to typically developing children matched on chronological age, verbal ability age and visuo-spatial ability age. The next investigation was conducted on the same group of children and examined how children with ASD attended to faces of different familiarity including, familiar, unfamiliar and the child’s own face. These faces were also presented with direct gaze or averted gaze to investigate how this would impact on the children’s allocation of attention. The final exploration highlighted how children with ASD (n = 20; age = 12y3m) attended to socially salient information (faces) and non-socially salient information (objects) presented within social scenes of varying complexity, compared to typically developing controls. Again groups were matched based on chronological age, verbal ability age, and visuo-spatial ability age. Results Children with ASD were shown to allocate attention to faces presented within their picture communication symbols similarly compared to their typically developing counterparts. All children were shown to fixate significantly longer on the face images compared to the object images. The children with ASD fixated for similar amounts of time to the eye and mouth regions regardless of familiarity and gaze direction compared to their controlled matches. All groups looked significantly longer at the eye areas compared to the mouth areas of the faces across all familiarity types. The children also fixated longer on the eye and mouth regions of direct gazing faces compared to the regions presented on the averted gazing faces. The children with ASD fixated on the faces and objects presented within social scenes similar to their typically developing counterparts across all complexity conditions. The children were shown to fixate significantly longer on the objects compared to the faces. Conclusions Children with ASD showed typical allocation of attention to faces. This suggests that faces are not aversive to them and they are able to attend to the relevant areas such as eye and mouth regions. This may have been influenced by the inclusion of high functioning children with ASD. However these results may also suggest that attention allocation and gaze behaviour are not the only factors which contribute to the socio-communicative impairments observed in ASD.

Very little information exists regarding the communication ofnonverbal adults with severe Intellectual Disabilities(ID) and Autism Spectrum Disorder(ASD). Most research in this area pertains to children. This study poses the following questions: “Howdononverbal, intellectually disabled adults who haveASD and those people who have contact with them on a regular day-to-day basis communicate with each other? What enhancesand or strengthens this communication? Can positive development in communication occur?”Based upon the data retrieved from eleven interviews, portraits of the communicative relationships of nonverbal adults with ID and ASDand their caregivers were compiled. The results of the study confirmed the existence of a personalized, functional system of communication between nonverbal adults with severe ID and ASD and their caregivers. The information gathered revealed improvement in communication. It was discovered, moreover, that a key factor in communicative development was the creation of common conceptual ground between caregiver and service user. Several attitudes and behaviors on the part of caregivers were noted to increase this common conceptual ground. The study’s conclusion cites the limitations, in methodology and scope, of the current investigation, and calls for more wide-ranging research on the communication of nonverbal adults with ID and ASD. / Det finnsidagintemycket information tillgängliggällandekommunikation avicke-verbala vuxna med gravtintellektuella funktionshinder ochAutismspektrumtillstånd. En stor delav forskningsom har bedrivitsidetta område gäller barn. Frågeställningarna i denna uppsats är: ”Hur kommuniceraricke-verbala vuxna med intellektuella funktionshinder och Autismspektrumtillståndi sin vardagmed de människor som finns runt omkring dem?Vad är det som gynnaroch förstärkerdenna kommunikation? Kan dennakommunikationutvecklas och förbättras?Med information från intervjuer med elva omsorgsgivare skapades femporträtt av detkommunikativa samspeletmellan icke-verbala individer med gravtintellektuella funktionshinder och Autismspektrumtillstånd, och deras kontaktmän. Studiens resultat visade att det finns ettfungerande, individualiserat kommunikationssystem mellan omsorgstagare och omsorgsgivare. En förbättring i kommunikationennoterades. Man har kunnat se att omsorgsgivarens attitydoch förhållningsättgentemot omsorgstagaren varit betydande fördenna förbättring. Resultatenvisade att utvidgning av den gemensamma konceptuella grunden[common conceptual ground] mellan omsorgstagare och omsorgsgivare var en viktig faktor i den kommunikativaförbättringen. Flera faktorer visade sig vara avgörande i expansionen av den gemensamma konceptuella grunden. Det påpekasatt det fanns uppenbara begränsningar i bredden och metodeni denna studie och det konstateras att det finns behovav mera omfattande forskning omkommunikation av icke-verbala vuxna med intellektuella funktionshinder och Autismspektrumtillstånd.

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