Autism SIG

By Justin Leaf

The Autism SIG has been very busy this year meeting our goals of promoting evidence-based treatment, promoting best practice as it relates to procedures/interventions based upon the principals of applied behavior analysis (ABA), helping consumers identify components of ABA, help protect autistic individuals from non-evidenced based procedures; and being a scientific resource for our members. The Autism SIG has continued to ensure that autistic voices are part of our professional conferences, and we were instrumental in having Eileen Lamb be a keynote speaker at this year’s ABAI Annual Autism Conference. Additionally, members of the Autism SIG Executive Council have been advocating for other regional, national, and international conferences to start having autistic adults present at their conferences. This has resulted in numerous conferences including more and more autistic voices. The second major endeavor that we have undertaken this year has been submitting response papers to misinformation about behavioral intervention as it applies to intervention for autistic individuals. The purpose of these papers has been to help consumers better navigate various concerns about ABA and how to still implement quality ABA.