Michaela DuBay - Supporting Autism Across Cultures: Focus on Latin America

•    Do you speak Spanish? Are you interested in culture, language, or child development? Come join the EPCI lab! 
•    Background: Children showing early signs of autism greatly benefit from early identification and intervention. Their long term developmental and academic progress improves when they get high quality intervention early in their development. Most research that proves the effectiveness of early intervention strategies was conducted with primarily white, mid to upper-class, monolingual English-speaking families in the US or UK. Families outside of this cultural group are inevitably presented with strategies not designed specifically for their own cultural strengths, skills, and perspectives. To date, there are no studies that have directly tested these research-based strategies in Latinx immigrant families in the US or families in Bolivia. This disparity in access to culturally-aligned intervention contributes to inequity in the education of children with autism from diverse backgrounds. Come help us try to solve this issue!
•    Current projects: In Bolivia, we implemented a peer-delivered early autism intervention study to reduce intervention access barriers. In this project, we trained parents in a therapy which they then delivered to groups of other families of children with autism. We are currently both analyzing the impact of that project on families as well as using those results to adapt the program for follow-up projects. One of those projects will train teachers in rural areas to implement that program with families, with an additional implementation in Kenya. The other project will train families to work with adolescents with autism rather than just young children. Finally, focusing on Latinx children from Spanish-speaking homes in the US, we are re-examining the language patterns which form the base of many autism interventions. Specifically, links between parent interaction behaviors and children’s later language development will be assessed to identify culturally-relevant parent behaviors that lead to child language growth over time using a strengths-based approach. 
•    Student roles: Students can contribute to a range of tasks in these projects. Students may help to prepare and coordinate activities for the teacher-delivered intervention in Bolivia that will happen in the spring of 2026. Students may also help in preparing interview materials, as well as conducting interviews or collecting data from the interviews themselves with participants of our studies in Bolivia. For our US-based project, students may contribute to data collection of the child’s communication environment or language skills by watching videos and logging characteristics of parent-child interactions.