Case management, working with youth and groups from diverse backgrounds and dual diagnosing (co-occurring disorders)

Paper details:

Article Review #1HSML 3850. 020 Assessment of Behavioral and Chemical AddictionsJane DoeSubmitted To:Dr. LumarDate Article Review #1REFERENCEVolden, J., & Johnston, J. (2016). Cognitive scripts in autistic children and adolescents. Journal of Autism & Developmental Disorders, 29(3), 203-211. PURPOSEPeople tend to follow scripts for social interaction and the study’s goal was test whether a child with autism used that script. Previous studies have shown that autistic children might have the knowledge on how to do something or how to respond to someone, but do not follow through with the script unless prompted. RESEARCH QUESTIONSThe question asked by the authors was do high-functioning children with autism possess the social scripts of everyday situations, and how do they compare to the control group of typical children with the same mental age and language skill.SUBJECTSThere were 24 children with autism and 37 in the control group. The two groups were subdivided into high and low based on their language and nonverbal skills. The ages ranged from 5 to 18 years.SAMPLING PROCEDURESThe children with autism were recruited from a local association providing social services to children with autism. The control group were identified as average by their teachers and obtained from local schools. DATA COLLECTION METHODOLOGYInteractions were videotaped and then transcribed and analyzed. DATA ANALYSIS METHODOLOGY Two people blind to the purpose and subject diagnoses completed the transcriptions and reliability exceeded 90%. Ten transcripts were compared and selected randomly. The narratives from the first task were evaluated by the scriptable competence identified by Fivush and Slackman (1986): (a) the total number of acts included in the script, (b) the appropriateness of included acts (e.g., “Next they wear dresses” would be an example of an inappropriate act in a grocery store script), (c) the proportion of core or essential acts that were included (e.g., “Paying” is a core or essential act in a restaurant, “leaving a tip” is appropriate but not fundamental) and (d) whether or not acts were sequenced appropriately (e.g., “getting popcorn” after “watching the movie” would be coded as out of sequence) (as cited in Volden & Johnston, 1999). The responses were compared to 30 normal adult responses to these situations to determine “appropriateness”. Acts that were not included by the adults were coded as inappropriate. The primary variable of the second task was the proportion of appropriate predictions. The responses were compared to those made by a sample of normal adults. The third task looked at the identification of violations to the core elements of the script, and the proportion of accurate identifications was again used.FINDINGSThe results show that children with autism are less competent than normal children in generating script narratives. However, they were comparable to their developmentally matched peers when predicting the next element in the videotaped scenario. They were even able to predict in Task 2 the critical step they had left out in Task 1, which shows they were able to produce the information in a more structured task. The participants with autism were equally able to predict the core elements in unfamiliar situations as their peer control group. The participants as a whole did well recognizing when a script had been violated.CRITIQUE A possible reason why an autistic child might have difficulty with the narrative portion of the study is anxiety with producing the correct words, i.e. perfectionism might play a role in how autistic children perform. This could also explain why the autistic group did comparably well on the critique portion of the study (what does not fit with the script?) because perfectionisagnts tend to be overly critical