Daily Living Skills Intervention for Adolescents With Autism Spectrum Disorder

Autism Spectrum Disorder Clinical Trial

Official title: Pilot RCT of a Daily Living Skills Intervention for Adolescents With Autism Spectrum Disorder in the Last 2 Years of High School

Status Active, not recruiting

Clinical Trial Summary

The main objective of the current proposal is to conduct a pilot RCT (i.e., treatment group and social skills control group) to examine how participation in Surviving and Thriving in the Real World (STRW) Intervention affects proximal outcomes with a larger sample size (n = 72). As social skills, executive functioning, and parenting factors have been linked to the acquisition of Daily Living Skills (DLS), the current study will also explore how these are linked to participation in STRW. Lastly, goal attainment scaling (GAS) will be utilized, along with gold standard parent report and adolescent self-report measures, to assess DLS.

Clinical Trial Description

Individuals with high functioning autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are not developing the skills necessary to successfully transition from adolescence to college, employment, and independent living.

Daily living skills have been linked to positive adult outcome in individuals with ASD.

Despite the importance of daily living skills to adult outcome, adolescents with high functioning ASD have impaired daily living skills.

A complex set of environmental, individual, and family factors likely affect the ability of adolescents with high functioning ASD to acquire critical daily living skills.

There are currently no evidence-based daily living skills intervention packages for adolescents with high functioning ASD that would prepare them for independence in adulthood.

The pilot RCT will consist of running 4 cohorts of 16-20 high functioning adolescents with ASD (IQ>70) and their parents in a STRW treatment group or social skills control group. Once an eligible cohort of 16-20 adolescents with ASD has been recruited, adolescents will be randomly assigned to either the STRW group or control group using a stratified randomized block design with IQ as a strata variable (IQ<85 and IQ>85) to ensure balanced group assignment for each cohort. Approximately 8-10 adolescents with ASD and their parents will participate in each STRW group. Thus, across 4 cohorts, the goal will be to enroll at least a total of 72 adolescents in the study, 36 in the STRW group and 36 in the control group across Years 1-3.

To test Aim 1: Initially a two-sample t-test will be used to test the difference on the change scores in the Vineland-3 DLS domain and GAS (post-treatment and baseline) between the STRW and control groups. Although this is a randomized study it is possible that some of the demographic variables might be differentially distributed between the groups. In this case, the initial analysis will be followed by a general linear regression analysis where cohort will be treated as the main effect and other differentially distributed variables will be added to the model as possible confounders in order to investigate the independent effect of the intervention group on outcome.

To test Aim 2: The within-subject change between post-treatment and 6-month follow-up for each individual receiving the intervention will be calculated and a paired t-test will be conducted to evaluate this change (post-treatment and 6-month follow-up).

To test Aim 3: Exploratory analyses will be conducted to examine the relationship between progress in DLS and executive functioning, social skills, and parenting and family factors. A regression analysis will be used to estimate and examine this potential relationship. In this model the change score (post-treatment and baseline) will be modeled as a function of each of the measures of executive function, social skills and parenting and family factors. This will allow us to characterize the response profile. ;

Related Conditions & MeSH terms

• Autism Spectrum Disorder
• Autistic Disorder
• Child Development Disorders, Pervasive

• NCT number: NCT03984487
• Study type: Interventional
• Source: Children's Hospital Medical Center, Cincinnati
• Status: Active, not recruiting
• Phase: N/A
• Start date: May 17, 2018
• Completion date: August 31, 2023