| dc.description.abstract | The following master thesis contains two articles. The first gives a theoretical outlining of Early Intensive Behavior Intervention (EIBI) and the research regarding the short-term effectiveness of this intervention. Then followed by an account for autism adult outcome research. The article reveals that there is currently no evidence available regarding the adult outcome for persons with autism who received EIBI in their childhood. Further, the paper emphasizes the need for longitudinal outcome studies for persons with autism, investigating whether EIBI may result in better adult outcome.
The second article is an empirical research article, which presents adult outcome data on eight persons who were diagnosed with Childhood Autism and received intensive educational intervention in early childhood. This is an 18-year follow-up of the studies of Eikeseth, Smith, Jahr and Eldevik (2002, 2007), which compared a group of children receiving EIBI (N = 13) to a group of children receiving intensive eclectic treatment (N = 12). They found that the EIBI group made extensively larger progress than the eclectic group. In this current study, the data has been analyzed individually, as one group and as two groups. The small sample size (N = 8) extensively compromises the validity of the results. However, the data show that, as a group there is progress on both IQ and adaptive function from childhood to adulthood, but no significant change. The group with persons who received EIBI, show significant change for IQ. Further, no significance was found for adaptive behavior, but a larger change was found for the EIBI group than for the persons who received the eclectic treatment. These preliminary findings indicate that EIBI may be effective in long-long term and contribute in producing better adult outcome for persons with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). | en_US |
