Defense Date

8-7-2025

Graduation Date

Fall 12-19-2025

Availability

Immediate Access

Submission Type

dissertation

Degree Name

PhD

School

School of Education

Committee Chair

Bridget Green

Committee Member

Reva Mathieu-Sher

Committee Member

Elizabeth McCallum

Keywords

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), Early childhood intervention, Video modeling, Social communication skills, Culturally specific greetings, Saudi Arabia, Prompting procedures, Behavioral reinforcement, Single subject design, Social skills acquisition, Skill maintenance

Abstract

A lack of social communication skills, including initiation and responding, has been a prominent characteristic of children diagnosed with ASD (Kanner, 1943; Kroeger et al., 2007). Enhancing these skills in children with ASD during early childhood is crucial to their future relationships, friendships, participation in communal activities, and overall lowering the likelihood of adverse long-term effects, giving significance to this age as a pivotal period for enhancing various skills (Hart Barnett, 2018). Failure to provide interventions to address social communication in children with ASD, specifically in cultures that value this skill, can impede their integration into that society. Thus, this study aimed to develop social initiation, particularly culturally specific greetings, and responding skills in preschool children with ASD in Saudi Arabia by using a video modeling intervention with least-to-most prompting and reinforcement. Three preschool children with ASD participated in the study. A multiple baseline design across participants was used to evaluate the effectiveness of the video modeling intervention on the two targeted social behaviors: initiating a cultural religious greeting and responding to “How are you?”. The result of the study demonstrated that VM, along with prompting and reinforcement, is an effective intervention in enhancing social outcomes in young children with ASD. Maintenance data also indicated that all the participants were able to maintain the skills acquired two weeks after the intervention. The results of this study align with previous research in supporting the use of VM and prompting procedures as effective interventions in enhancing the social outcomes of young children with ASD.

Language

English

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