Opt-In Early Pilot Study

Study Summary

Latinx and Rural-living children with diagnosed or suspected autism have especially long wait times for diagnoses and intervention, up to a year or even more. This delayed access to intervention is likely to prevent children from reaching their full potential in skills and adaptive functioning. A comprehensive, online mobile device-based, free intervention that can be used by parents while on these wait lists may optimize their child's development. The investigators have developed such a program, the Online Parent Training in Early Intervention (OPT-In-Early) program. It teaches parents the fundamental principles of both applied behavior analysis and naturalistic interventions, uses non-technical language, video demonstrations, guidance in selecting appropriate skills to teach, embedding teaching into daily routines, and reducing interfering behaviors. It is a self-paced, individualized platform giving parents strategies to strengthen the parent-child relationship, to teach basic skills, such as simple communication, to reduce interfering behaviors, and to establish helpful routines. In pilot the RCT, parents (half of whom were self-identified as Latinx) rated the program very highly and showed positive changes in behavior and knowledge. The goal of the current project is to develop, and pilot test a bilingual Spanish/English culturally tailored version of OPT-In-Early for Latinx families in the US, as well as tailoring and testing the program for rural communities of Oregon. First, the investigators will obtain detailed, iterative feedback from bilingual Latinx parents with an autistic child regarding OPT-In-Early. Similar feedback will also be obtained from participants from rural communities of Oregon who also have an autistic child. The investigators will use this feedback to culturally adapt the program content and format. Next, the adapted program will be modified via user testing with Spanish speaking parents and English speaking parents. Finally, the bilingu

Primary Outcome

It is a measure of observed parent use of intervention strategies, to assess Parent Fidelity. This is observational measure is videotaped and coded by a trained rater blind to group. Parents are asked to do 4 activities with their child, keeping the child as engaged as possible: (1) Work on a puzzle (2) Teach your child to imitate you doing a simple behavior that you haven't already taught them to imitate; (3) Play with your child using bubbles. (4) Feed your child a snack. Each activity is reco

Interventions

• OTHER Opt-In Early Latinx intervention
• OTHER Opt-In Early Rural Intervention