FACILITATED COMMUNICATION FOR CHILDREN WITH AUTISM - AN EXAMINATION OF FACE VALIDITY

Although there has been ample controversy about the need for validatio n studies of facilitated communication (FC), FC proponents have outlin ed minimum guidelines for increasing the naturalistic manner in which FC is examined. In this investigation, the face validity of FC was exa mined with attention to these guidelines. Three children with autism w ho used FC to communicate participated in the study. Sentence completi on statements in which the correct responses were alternately known or unknown to the facilitator were presented using a variation of a mult iple-treatment design. Special consideration was given to previous cri ticisms of controlled investigations of FC in the development of the m ethod. A total of 240 responses were evaluated in relation to form acc uracy (spelling) and content accuracy (correct or incorrect answer) us ing a 10-point rating scale. The data from this study strongly suggest that the content of the responses was influenced systematically by fa cilitators.