This is a bibliographic record of a published health technology assessment from a member of INAHTA. No evaluation of the quality of this assessment has been made for the HTA database.

Wright B, Marshall D, Adamson J, Ainsworth H, Ali S, Allgar V, Moore DC, Cook E, Dempster P, Hackney L, McMillan D, Trepél D, Williams C. Social Stories to alleviate challenging behaviour and social difficulties exhibited by children with autism spectrum disorder in mainstream schools: design of a manualised training toolkit and feasibility study for a cluster randomised controlled trial with nested qualitative and cost-effectiveness components. Health Technology Assessment 2016; 20(6)

A Social Story™ (Carol Gray) is a child-friendly intervention that is used to give children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) social information in situations where they have social difficulties. Limited evidence mainly using single-case designs suggests that they can reduce anxiety and challenging behaviour. The objectives were to conduct a systematic review, use this to develop a manualised intervention and run a feasibility trial to inform a fully powered randomised controlled trial (RCT) on their clinical effectiveness and cost-effectiveness in schools.

The study showed that a fully powered RCT is feasible with an extended geographical footprint. A large amount of data and information has helped to inform the design of this RCT, which will be the subject of a future research grant application. Future work could focus on developing an appropriate blinded outcome measure for this population.

Subject indexing assigned by CRD

Autistic Disorder; Childs; Schools

English

England

An English language summary is available.

NETSCC, Health Technology Assessment, Alpha House, University of Southampton Science Park, Southampton, SO16 7NS UK Tel: +44 23 8059 5586 Email: hta@hta.ac.uk

32011001660

11/05/2012