From the abstract: "Transitioning Together is a multi-family intervention designed to support families of adolescents on the autism spectrum as they prepare for the transition to adulthood. Questions remain regarding its wide-scale adoption and implementation in real-world settings such as high schools. We examined student, teacher, and school-level facilitators and barriers to adopting and implementing Transitioning Together at 30 public high schools across three US states that were participating in the intervention arm of a larger randomized trial, which provided training and coaching for implementation of comprehensive evidence-based autism programming. Seventeen of the 30 schools adopted Transitioning Together. Community socioeconomic status and pre-existing quality of programming for family involvement and transition planning significantly predicted intervention adoption. Thirteen of the 17 schools that adopted Transitioning Together did so with a high level of fidelity (>90%). The areas of fidelity that schools struggled with most related to session structure, facilitating problem-solving and dialogue, and collecting feedback from families. Findings highlight struggles and successes with real-world adoption of the intervention in its current form. Future research is needed to further examine how to facilitate adoption across public high schools and/or other service systems, while maximizing effectiveness, as well as reach to historically underserved autism spectrum populations."
January
2022
Kuhn, J., Szidon, K., Kraemer, B., Steinbrenner, J. R., Tomaszewski, B., Hume, K., & DaWalt, L. (2022). Implementation of a multi-family autism transition program in the high school setting. Autism. Advance online publication. DOI: 10.1177/13623613211065533
10.1177/13623613211065533