Evaluating Social Communication Outcomes in Young Children Following Caregiver-Mediated Early Intervention

During the 10-week PURM research experience, I worked on Project PEACE for ImPACT, a community-partnered study within Philadelphia’s early intervention system that supports young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). My work involved behavioral coding of parent coaching sessions, observation of provider consultations, and participation in small-group interventions for children ages 3–5. I also engaged in weekly journal clubs on autism intervention and implementation science and assisted in dissemination efforts.

A primary focus of my project was assessing child outcomes, with an emphasis on social communication. Using the Project AIM framework (Sandbank et al., 2019), I applied a structured approach to categorizing child outcomes within the PEACE for ImPACT dataset. Specifically, I analyzed Social Communication Checklist (SCC) data from the study’s first and second cohorts across four domains: social engagement, expressive language, receptive language, and imitation & play. Using paired-sample t-tests, I compared baseline scores to week 24 scores, which revealed statistically significant improvements across all domains and the total SCC score (p < .05). These findings suggest that the intervention was associated with meaningful gains in social communication skills. This work contributes to the broader effort to evaluate and enhance early intervention strategies for children with ASD in community-based contexts.