Essay Sample on Stars ABA

Introduction

Autism can be defined as a neurobehavioral condition which is complicated since it includes impairments in developmental language, repetitive behaviors, social interaction as well as communication skills combined with rigid. It is also known as autism spectrum disorder due to its range of symptoms. It mainly affects children to the extent that they find it difficult to understand what other people feel and think. They also see it hard communicating and therefore, they are unable to express themselves either through facial expressions, touch, words or through gestures (Wong et al 2015). Children with autism who are very sensitive are greatly troubled and sometimes pained by sights, sounds smell or touches that others see as usual, and due to this they deserve a lot of care and training to enable them to develop new behaviors that will allow them to live a happy life. Stars ABA is an organization that provides clinic-based ABA interventions to such children, and therefore this paper will try to show the problems that face the Stars ABA and provide solutions to these problems.

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Problem Identification

Like any other organization, Stars ABA faces particular challenges as it tries to achieve its goals and objectives. After conducting a preliminary assessment with personnel in the organization there were problems identified which include; lack of frequent delivery of reinforcements by the staff whenever the children engage in appropriate behavior, team reacting emotionally as well as providing a lot of attention whenever the children participate in inappropriate behavior, the organization experiencing a high rate of turnover, and late arrival of some staff members during their scheduled shifts. One primary tool that is employed to gather this information is by the use of questionnaires which are set in a way that they encourage the personnel in the organization to state all the problems that the organization faces (Zhang et al 2017). After the surveys are returned, then it would be appropriate to conduct some personal interviews to ensure that the information gathered through questionnaires are clear and understood by the researcher and are also correct.

A questionnaire is a set of written or printed questions that have a choice of answers created for statistical or survey study. The polls guide the researcher into achieving specific information. An interview, on the other hand, is a one to one conversation between the researcher and the researched whereby the researcher asks questions while the researched provides answers that help the researcher in his/her research study (Aarons et al 2015). In our case, the two methods of collecting data will be appropriate to understand more about Stars ABA. Both the questionnaire and interviews help the researcher gather primary data, which he/she will utilize to make decisions and provide solutions to problems identified. Primary data is data collected from the first-hand experience directly or from the source. It is also known as raw data.

The primary function of Stars ABA is to provide applied behavior analysis intervention which is a scientific discipline concerned with the application of techniques based on learning principles to change the behavior of social significance. Applied behavior analysis is a type of therapy whose primary purpose of focus is to improve specific practices such as academics, social skills, communication, and reading as well as adaptive learning skills such as job competence, excellent motor dexterity, internal capabilities, hygiene, punctuality, and grooming. Stars ABA requires an adequate environment and active participation by the staff as well as the children to play its role effectively. This is not the case because the team in the organization fail to perform their functions effectively; therefore, the organization needs to first of all check into this issue and find out why the staff is not committing themselves to help the organization achieve its goals.

The organization needs to investigate and understand why some of its staff arrive late at their scheduled shifts, why they do not respond effectively when the children either behaves inappropriately or appropriately, it also requires to understand why the rate of turnover is too high. This will be much help as it will help the organization make appropriate decisions and offer change whenever necessary to allow it to achieve its set goals and objectives. This will also be helpful to the children under the care of the organization to enable them to adopt new behaviors that will allow them to live a normal life like any other individual.

When the staff arrives late for work, they should be punished by not being allowed the free services that the organization offers to the staff members. This will help reduce the number of staff members who come to work late. When one works for Stars ABA for a year, he/she should be motivated by being rewarded a particular gift at the end of the year. The organization should set aside gifts that are highly valued by the staff members so that it can pay them at the end of each year. This will help reduce the high rate of turnover that the company is experiencing. When the organization offers coaching and mentoring to the staff members, they will react in the right way when the children they are dealing with behave inappropriately or appropriately.

Program Question and Research Design

The program question of the study is to establish why staff members in Stars ABA offer poor services and why they are not offering their best to the organization. The best research design in our case here is the quasi-experimental research design. The reason for choosing this design is because it is commonly used by researchers to estimate the causal effect of an intervention on the targeted population without any random assignment. By use of the problems identified within the Stars ABA organization, the researcher can come up with an estimate of expected effects of the issues to the organization and give some solutions on how these problems can be resolved to avoid the impact. An example is that due to the inadequate response of the staff members to either appropriate or inappropriate behavior if children under Stars ABA, the organization may fail to achieve its set goals and objectives of creating appropriate actions for these children in such a way that they will feel as others whose behaviors are usually healthy.

In the quasi-experiment, the results produced can be used in reinforcing the findings of case studies through research conducting which may itself lend to statistical analysis, but on the other hand, the statistical analysis may be meaningless because of lack of randomization as well as threats to internal validity. In this design, it is easy to identify and address risks to efficacy in the effort to maximize the impact of these threats. The approaches of the quasi-experiment may reduce the resources as well as the time needed mainly because randomization and extensive pre-screening are not utilized or required. On the other hand, in the validity of any project, human error plays a key role also the research has to observe the ethical standards for it to be valid.

Selection and Description of Intervention

Reinforcement plan for staff intervention will best fit in our case; this is by use of positive reinforcement for staff which is a practice of gratifying required employee behavior so that the behavior can be strengthened. Positive support for staff motivation helps in increasing the utility of the staff member to the organization since when you reward a staff member for doing a good job; you motivate the staff even to do the job even better than he/she did it before. Hence in this intervention, it will be implemented through positive reinforcement or rewarding staff members for the job they do.

There is a need for me as a researcher to be involved in implementing this program to enable the collection of data and to ensure the research objective is achieved. The program will be performed in such a way that any positive and good move made by any staff member is rewarded accordingly without discrimination. The staff members will receive coaching and mentoring from professionals in applied behavior analysis which will help them in their dealing with children in the organization. The organization will provide a cup of tea and a quarter loaf of bread every morning of the working days at 7:30 am this is to motivate the staff members to report to work on time and reduce late reporting of work. The organization will set aside a certain amount which will be issued to staff who record the best performance in the organization every month this will motivate the team to give their best and act competitively in the organization.

The researcher will be involved in the program to ensure that any change incurred or identified in the organization is recorded so that analysis can be done to verify whether the research objective is achieved. The behavior to be documented is data indicating how the positive reinforcement by the organization results to staff behavioral change. Some of the behavior to be checked is the staff turnover, response of staff to different children behavior as well as reporting time for all staff members for their scheduled shifts. For statistical data representation, the spreadsheet will be appropriate which will be used to come up with graphs to represent the data.

The program will be guided by two goals which will help the researcher achieve his/her research objective. One goal is to ensure that the program has enabled the staff members of the organization are motivated into giving their best into the organization and the second one is to provide that the organization runs smoothly by overcoming the challenges that are as a result of staff behavior to enable it to achieve its set goals and objectives.

Program Evaluation

For the evaluation, the data will be collected after every two weeks this will be through observations and analysis of the recorded data. To check whether the behaviors were genuine the results produced as a result of behavior change will be assessed an undertaking that will take place every two weeks. Factors to be considered here will be whether the staff reported working on time daily and if not, how many days do the staff report on time and how many days do they report late. Another factor is to determine what is the rate of staff turnover after every three months to check whether it reduces, increases or remains the same as before. The data that results will be evaluated through visual analysis whereby visualization mainly focuses on analytical reasoning which is facilitated by interactive visual interfaces.

This data will be used to determine whether the intervention is valid and whether the staff motivation increased their utility into the organization and whether the organizations' products are now useful or remains the same. When the results are positive, and the organization expanded its output, the rate or staff turnover reduces, and the team can respond in the right way to the behavior of the children then the intervention can be said to be active and the organization should borrow the concepts of the response in its daily operation to ensure it increases its productivity and competition in its service.

References

Aarons, G. A., Ehrhart, M. G., Farahnak, L. R., & Hurlburt, M. S. (2015). Leadership and organizational change for implementation (LOCI): a randomized mixed method pilot study of a leadership and organization development intervention for evidence-based practice implementation. Implementation Science, 10(1), 11.

Wong, C., Odom, S. L., Hume, K. A., Cox, A. W., Fettig, A., Kucharczyk, S., ... & Schultz,...