Treatments of Autism- Evaluation points for ABA

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Treatments of Autism- Evaluation points for ABA

Advantages

  • Lovaas (1987) Compared 19 children who had 40 hours of this therapy a week for 2 years compared with 40 children who did not have the intervention (control group). They found that 9 out of 19 children remained in school with minimal support compared to only 1 out of 40 children in the control group. This supports the effectiveness of ABA because later on a follow up was done by McEachin et al. (1993) who found that the experimental group had maintained its' improvement compared to the control group.
  • Parent and the child's family can be involved in the ABA therapy and can continue with it. Also they understand more about the antecedents and consequences of behaviours so ABA ideas can be used in other parts of child's life.However although parents can be involved therapists are needed to at the start to set up the programme.

Disadvantages

  • There are many different interventions, approaches and techniques because the therapy is so tailored to the individual and this makes evaluating the effectiveness of the therapy difficult because the therapy is not applied consistently.
  • This therapy will only be effective if positive rewards are applied consistently. However there is a degree of subjectivity in deciding whether a child has done enough to receive positive reinforcement.
  • A criticism of ABA is that it limits children to what they are taught and does not let them make their own choices. A child is pushed towards "Acceptable" ways of behaving which is possibly unacceptable.

Evaluation

In conclusion ABA is effective as Lovaas supports this however the disadvantages outweigh the advantages as ABA is not as effective as CBT which is a much more long term treatment.

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