For both parents and practitioners, it can be hard to make sense of psychological research. This is especially true for research on applied behavior analysis, which is often known simply as ABA, and its effectiveness for helping children diagnosed with autism, which is often abbreviated as ASD for autistic spectrum disorder.
The reason for this difficulty is that the primary critique of research on ABA or other behavioral therapies for children with autism does not typically appear within the published research paper itself. The primary critique of published ABA research and ABA therapy methods for autism is that they lack ecological validity.
The very specific behaviors children learn in ABA are not able to be generalized to the rest of their experiences in more natural real world environments.
Ecological validity refers to the extent to which research can be generalized to real-life situations. In other words, research done within a laboratory setting may not be applicable in a real world context.
Why does this matter for ABA and children with autism? Because what makes ABA therapy useful at all for children on the autism spectrum is that it uses laboratory-derived behavioral techniques to train children the same way that a researcher would train a rat or a dog. ABA therapy breaks down basic and complex behaviors into small steps and uses prompting and positive reinforcement to motivate the rat, dog, or person to master that small step. Once each step is mastered, the next step is trained in the same way until the entire behavioral sequence is complete.
This is how dogs learn to “dance” around a stage on their back legs. The dog has no idea what dancing is but has learned to sequence a long series of small steps together to create this behavior that looks a lot like dancing.
ABA therapy as an intervention can teach a child with autism to perform important behaviors and discourage problem behaviors. In using laboratory-derived behavioral techniques, ABA therapists are able to bypass the social interaction challenges faced by children with autism.
However, in bypassing these ordinary social cues and interacting with the child in this structured artificial way, that child will struggle mightily to generalize what was learned when within more natural real world settings. That is why the primary criticism of behavioral approaches to autism therapy like ABA center on their ecological validity. It isn’t that their benefits are useless or their research is wrong. It is that they are very very limited. The very specific behaviors children learn in this manner are not able to be generalized to the rest of their experiences in more natural real world environments.
This weakness of ABA interventions for autism does not apply to the Floortime Approach, of which The Floortime Center is the world’s leading clinic. Please visit these links for more information about research on ABA and autism research explained for parents more generally.