Opt-In Early Pilot Study

Summary

Latinx and Rural-living children with diagnosed or suspected autism have especially long wait times for diagnoses and intervention, up to a year or even more. This delayed access to intervention is likely to prevent children from reaching their full potential in skills and adaptive functioning. A comprehensive, online mobile device-based, free intervention that can be used by parents while on these wait lists may optimize their child's development. The investigators have developed such a program, the Online Parent Training in Early Intervention (OPT-In-Early) program. It teaches parents the fundamental principles of both applied behavior analysis and naturalistic interventions, uses non-technical language, video demonstrations, guidance in selecting appropriate skills to teach, embedding teaching into daily routines, and reducing interfering behaviors. It is a self-paced, individualized platform giving parents strategies to strengthen the parent-child relationship, to teach basic skills, such as simple communication, to reduce interfering behaviors, and to establish helpful routines. In pilot the RCT, parents (half of whom were self-identified as Latinx) rated the program very highly and showed positive changes in behavior and knowledge. The goal of the current project is to develop, and pilot test a bilingual Spanish/English culturally tailored version of OPT-In-Early for Latinx families in the US, as well as tailoring and testing the program for rural communities of Oregon. First, the investigators will obtain detailed, iterative feedback from bilingual Latinx parents with an autistic child regarding OPT-In-Early. Similar feedback will also be obtained from participants from rural communities of Oregon who also have an autistic child. The investigators will use this feedback to culturally adapt the program content and format. Next, the adapted program will be modified via user testing with Spanish speaking parents and English speaking parents. Finally, the bilingual version will be tested in a six-month pilot RCT, in preparation for a fully powered R01 trial. The investigators will use a wait-list control design: the Intervention Now arm will be given the online program and the Intervention Later arm (controls) will be given educational material about autism. All children will receive a baseline and 6-month follow-up assessment, which will measure parent fidelity in using the intervention principles (the primary outcome), child social communication, level of autism symptoms, impact of autism symptoms, and degree of developmental delays. The Intervention Now group will have two subgroups. One will test the online program with an emphasis placed on the Spanish version, while the other will focus on the English version and complete the program through a rural lens. At the conclusion of this research, the investigators will have developed an evidence-based, comprehensive, freely available, parent-delivered intervention that can be used by US Latinx and rural families on their mobile devices as they await diagnosis and intervention. This will increase parent efficacy and reduce their stress, accelerate children's skills, reduce interfering behavior, and enhance PCPs' willingness to implement universal autism screening.

Conditions

• Autism Spectrum Disorder

Interventions

OTHER

Opt-In Early Latinx intervention

Participants will access to the Opt-In Early training program website, but will be able to access the Spanish language version as well. Families will fill out a usage diary to record their experience.

OTHER

Opt-In Early Rural Intervention

Participants will access to the Opt-In Early training program website. Parents will be able to interact with the rural community-oriented aspects of the program. Families will fill out a usage diary to record their experience.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)

  collaborator NIH

• Connecticut Children's Medical Center

  collaborator OTHER

• University of Connecticut

  collaborator OTHER

• University of Texas at Austin

  collaborator OTHER

• Oregon Health and Science University

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Katharine Zuckerman, MD MPH · Oregon Health and Science University

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

SUPPORTIVE_CARE

Masking

NONE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age

15 Months

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

No

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2025-12-31

Primary Completion

2028-12-31

Completion

2028-12-31

Countries

• United States

Study Locations