Measuring parent strategy use in early intervention: Reliability and validity of the Naturalistic Developmental...

Children with autism spectrum disorder benefit from early intervention to improve social communication, and parent-implemented interventions are a feasible and family-centered way to increase the amount of treatment they receive. For these treatments to be effective, it is important for the parent to implement the strategies as intended. However, measurement of parent strategy use is inconsistent across studies of parent-implemented interventions. This study evaluates the quality of the NDBI-Fi, an efficient measure, compared to a more time-consuming measure that is known to be precise. Videos of parents playing with their children were used to compare these two measurement methods. Results demonstrated that the NDBI-Fi was of good quality: scorers had high levels of agreement, the NDBI-Fi was similar to the more precise measure in rating parents after intervention, it detected changes from before to after intervention, and it detected differences when parents learned different types of intervention strategies. The NDBI-Fi was not as precise as the other measure across all strategies before parents learned intervention. Taken together, the findings of this study support the use of the NDBI-Fi as a high-quality outcome measure.