SLPOtherAutism : the international journal of research and practice2022

A method for defining the CORE of a psychosocial intervention to guide adaptation in practice: Reciprocal imitation teaching as a case example.

Sarah R Edmunds, Kyle M Frost, R Chris Sheldrick and 14 others

PMID 34991373

WHAT IT FOUND

The authors used a consensus method to split Reciprocal Imitation Teaching into mandatory, conditional, and recommended parts.

This helps clinicians know which strategies to keep and which to adapt, but the model was built by experts alone, not parents or community providers.

Key findings

01The CORE Fidelity Method was applied to Reciprocal Imitation Teaching (RIT) to create a model distinguishing essential from adaptable components.

02At the parent-child level, 12 components were identified as mandatory, 8 as conditional, and 6 as recommended; at the provider-parent level, 12 were mandatory and 9 recommended.

03Consensus was reached with five RIT developers and expert trainers, but no end-users like community clinicians or parents were included in this specific modeling process.

STILL TO COME

How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs

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What it does not show

The consensus model was built solely by RIT developers and academic trainers, excluding community providers and parents who actually deliver and receive the intervention. The paper describes the creation of a model but does not report any clinical outcomes or efficacy data for RIT. The categorization of components relies on expert opinion and hypothesized mechanisms, as empirical evidence for mediation effects in RIT was not yet available.

Declared interests

The study was supported by the National Institutes of Health (N.I.H., Extramural). No other conflicts of interest are explicitly detailed in the provided text.

The easy way to misread this

Do not interpret the identified 'mandatory' components as evidence that RIT works better than other interventions or that these specific components cause improvement. The model is a consensus of expert opinion on what defines the intervention, not a result from a clinical trial testing efficacy.

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