Joint Engagement Intervention

In the Journal for Autism and other Developmental Disabilities (JADD) this month, Connie Kasari, Amanda C. Gulsrud, Connie Wong, Susan Kwon, and Jill Locke published a research article titled Randomized Controlled Caregiver Mediated Joint Engagement Intervention for Toddlers with Autism. In this study they investigated a caregiver-mediated intervention targeting joint engagement skills in children younger than 3 years old who were diagnosed with autism. The participants included 19 parent-child dyads in the intervention group and 19 parent-child dyads in the wait-list control group. The intervention consisted of 24 training sessions which covered the following topics: setting up the environment, allowing the child to initiate an activity, playing within established routines, facilitating and maintaining states, scaffolding an engagement state, facilitating joint engagement, allowing the child to initiate communication, recognizing and responding to the child’s joint attention skills, imitating and expanding language, and generalizing skills to other routines. The researchers employed a parent-coaching model which consists of a trained interventionist teaching the parent how to implement the strategies while they (the parents) were working with their child.

They found that the adult participants were able to implement the strategies with fidelity during intervention and at 1-year followup (fidelity of implementation is a large component of intervention efficacy) and that the children participants showed significant improvements in joint engagement (defined as active involvement in activity with their parent) and these improvements maintained over time. The results of this study are promising because they show improvements in joint attention which is related to communication and social engagement (two core areas of deficit in autism). The intervention was also taught to and administered by a parent which can have additional benefits due to the increased number of hours the intervention is implemented because the parent is with the child for the majority of their day.