Experiences and Needs of Leaders Supporting Multilingual ABA Staff: A Qualitative Exploration

Heritage-language-speaking caregivers of autistic children in the United States (U.S.) have encountered barriers when attempting to access multilingual support for their children. Multilingual autism providers, such as professionals in Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA), have also reported challenges in providing multilingual care, such as a lack of training opportunities. Little is known about the experiences and needs of leaders in ABA who support multilingual direct care staff. Therefore, the current study aimed to answer the research question: What are the experiences and needs of ABA leaders in autism care related to supporting multilingual ABA staff who work with multilingual autistic children and their families? This exploratory qualitative study used semi-structured focus groups and interviews with monolingual and multilingual behavior analysts who had experience supporting multilingual ABA staff. Transcripts were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis. The 14 participants were a diverse sample of U.S.-based monolingual, multilingual, autistic, and non-autistic leaders in ABA with experience supervising multilingual ABA staff. Two major themes were generated from the data set: (1) Diverse Experiences: Organizational Policies and Actions Impacting Multilingual Staff, and (2) Building Community and Creating Solutions. Participants shared experiences and challenges supervising multilingual ABA staff. Implications highlight the need to closely examine organizational policies to prevent discrimination and spotlight the need for more research to be conducted in this area.