Operationalizing Behaviors for Analysis in Parents and Children with Autism

The purpose of this student project was to further refine the operational definitions of the parent and child behaviors in Dr. Jennifer Elder’s in-home training for fathers of autistic children. We were also able to determine the amount of time needed to train a behavioral coder to attain the established inter-rater reliability of .80. Individual inter-raters help observers both recognize ambiguous behaviors and discuss how to revise the behavior in question to eliminate miscoding. The work completed in this research project will help future researchers effectively code targeted behaviors of autistic children.