Teaching Safety Responding to Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Abstract

Children have been taught to demonstrate a safety response when they encounter a dangerous stimulus using behavioral skills training (BST). However, little research has evaluated the usefulness of BST to teach safety skills to children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In the current study, we evaluated BST to establish a generalized repertoire of safety skills in children with ASD. Three categories of safety skills were identified and multiple exemplars were taught to program for generalization to stimuli and settings not associated with training. The 3 participants demonstrated an appropriate safety response after BST training across trained and untrained exemplars and settings. Additionally, responding to trained exemplars maintained up to four weeks following training. High levels of social validity were also found. These results suggest BST is a viable training approach for training individuals with ASD to demonstrate safety skills and results are discussed in light of previous studies.