Hello everyone,
Firstly - thank you all so much for all of your responses. I will endeavour to get back to all of you over the next week or so.
Secondly - for the person who asked about what the following actually means:
'I am particularly interested in the use of multimodal and eclectic approaches to examine the `value´ of interventions and/or care pathways for children and adolescents with complex needs.'
Basically, one of the things I am interested in is how best to find out if a therapy has 'worked'. The obvious response to that might be, 'well, a therapy works if it improves a problem'. This then raises two points: (a) how do you judge if a problem has 'improved'?; and (b) can a therapy still be valuable even if it doesn't really 'improve' the problem, but has other impacts on someone's life instead?
Both of these issues are really important when thinking about any kind of intervention for children with very complex profiles of strengths and difficulties, and their families. My belief is that we have to think of very creative and diverse ways to judge what impact a therapy has made on real people's lives - and it might not just be about measuring whether one 'problem' has improved in a simple way.
There is a drive across many professions and services to be able to demonstrate that your approaches 'really work' - and this can lead to a drive to reduce very complex circumstances to a range of (usually numerical) 'outcomes' that can then be measured, in the same way that you could see if a medical treatment for blood pressure has 'worked' by taking a patient's blood pressure after the treatment and checking that it has dropped. But I'm not comfortable about this approach when working with issues such as those experienced by children with a diagnosis of autism and their families.
So by 'multimodal and eclectic', I mean that I am interested thinking about how to use multiple ways of examining the effects of therapy that bring in more than just this - including capturing the significance of the therapy and its consequences for the actual children and families that services are working with themselves. This, for me, involves using a wider range of methods than just 'measuring' something. Hope this makes sense?
... but also, I should point out that the project we are discussing on this thread isn't really relevant to all of this. The project is more about play in autism, rather than therapy for play in autism. But I do think that the project could ultimately help people (families, practitioners) think about how best to share 'play' experiences (depending on your definition of 'play') with children with autism. :)