This "Policy Research Brief" summarizes publicly-available data sources that provide information about the employment of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. It provides important information about these data sources, including their purposes, key definitions, and where to access the public data. Using these data…

To address the developmental deficits of children with autism, several disciplines have come to the forefront within intervention programs. These are speech-pathologists, psychologists/counselors, occupational-therapists/physical-therapists, special-education consultants, behavior analysts, and physicians/medical personnel. As the field of autism…

Social support is a potentially powerful mediator of well-being for family carers. Given that social engagement often decreases with age, the Internet broadens the opportunities for aging carers of individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities (I/DD) to provide support to one another. This article reviews what constitutes social…

Although adaptive behavior became a diagnostic criterion in the 5th edition of the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, AAIDD (Heber, 1959, 1961), there are no measures with adequate psychometric properties for diagnosing significant limitations in adaptive behavior according to the current conception of the…

This article reviews some sensitivity versus specificity imbalances in forensic investigations of child sexual abuse. It then proposes the development or further testing of additional approaches for those children who do not respond to the current, single-interview National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) protocol. Although…

There has been a gradual shift from a deficit to a support model for understanding disability over the last two decades. Although more attention is focused on supports at the individual level, policy has provided for the provision of family support. Despite this policy, families' needs for support are on the rise; and research suggests that…

Studies have evaluated a range of interventions to treat food selectivity in children with autism and related developmental disabilities. The high-probability instructional sequence is one intervention with variable results in this area. We evaluated the effectiveness of a high-probability sequence using 3 presentations of a preferred food on…

Objective: Epidemiological studies in the United States consistently find autism spectrum disorders (ASD) to be overrepresented in high socioeconomic status (SES) families. These findings starkly contrast with SES gradients of many health conditions, and may result from SES inequalities in access to services. We hypothesized that prenatal measures…

Individuals diagnosed with fragile X syndrome (FXS), the most common known form of inherited intellectual disability, are reported to exhibit considerable deficits in mathematical skills that are often attributed to brain-based abnormalities associated with the syndrome. We examined whether participants with FXS would display emergent…

Aim: To examine the internal consistency, test-retest reliability, and responsiveness of the Movement Assessment Battery for Children--Second Edition (MABC-2) Test for children with developmental coordination disorder (DCD). Method: One hundred and forty-four Taiwanese children with DCD aged 6 to 12 years (87 males, 57 females) were tested on…

The term parapatric speciation, borrowed from biogeography, is used as a metaphor for describing and illustrating a little acknowledged change in the field of early intervention that occurred at the time of the passage of the Education of the Handicapped Act Part H early intervention legislation. The term refers to the formation of a new species…

Most research on stimulus preference and reinforcer assessment involves a preference assessment that is followed by a reinforcer assessment. Typically, the most and least preferred stimuli are tested as reinforcers. In the current study, we first quantified the reinforcing efficacies of six food items and then assessed relative preference for each…

In recent years there has been a shift to recognise the needs of siblings and a growth in sibling support largely for under 16s. However, siblings will often require support into adulthood as they undertake additional responsibilities from parents in the care or advocacy of their brother or sister. Therefore this project aimed to investigate what…

Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) is a widely used but poorly understood statistical procedure. This paper described EFA and its methodological variations. Then, key methodological variations were used to evaluate EFA usage over a 10-year period in five leading developmental disabilities journals. Sixty-six studies were located and evaluated on…

Safety skills are an important but often neglected area of training for persons with developmental disabilities (DD). The present study reviewed the literature on teaching safety skills to persons with DD. Safety skills involve a variety of behaviors such as knowing how to cross the street or what to do in case of a house fire. A number of studies…