Project AIM: Autism intervention meta-analysis for studies of young children

What is it about?

This paper synthesizes evidence from all group design studies of interventions that featured children with autism aged 0-8 years. The results report intervention effects by outcome domain (e.g., language, social communication, cognition, etc.) and by intervention approach (e.g., behavior, developmental, naturalistic developmental behavioral interventions). A total of 150 reports of 130 separate studies featuring over 6,000 children contributed to the results reported in this paper.

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Why is it important?

This is the first comprehensive meta-analysis to synthesizes evidence across all group design studies of intervention for children with autism. This is especially important given the recent rapid transformation of the evidence base; over 100 group design studies of interventions to support children with autism (including at least 50 randomized controlled trials) were published in the last decade. This meta-analysis also summarizes the quality of evidence for different intervention approaches and explores outcome-level quality indicators and their impact on intervention effects, illustrating that common researcher-made measurement decisions can bias our understanding of intervention effectiveness.