Research On Effectiveness Of Attention Distraction Strategy In Autistic Children's Self-injury Intervention

Self-injury is an extremely dangerous problematic behavior. It will lead individuals to direct injury. There are many individuals suffer from self-injury in the realm of special education. Therefore, this thesis is aimed at discussing the effectiveness of interfering two autistic children's self-injury behavior through the strategy of attention distraction.Two autistic children who have self-injury behavior are research subjects in this thesis. Research approaches such as visit, observation and single subject's reversal-replication design are applied. Among these approaches, reversal-replication design contains four steps: baseline A1 phase, intervention B1 phase, withdrawal A2 phase and re-intervention B2 phase. When analyzing materials, liner analysis function regress in Mathematical software Matlab and teacher interview were adopted to predict the inclination and draw the inclination's curve.The research in this thesis contains two parts, one is functional evaluation. By visiting subject's parents, teacher, filling out behavior motivation rating scale form, direct observation record, subject's self-injury behavior's functionality and motivation can be understood. Results showed that subject's self-injury behavior's primary functionality is acquiring sensuous stimulus, escape, acquisition of object and arousing awareness. The other one is stretching experiment design and intervention plan according to functional evaluation and then, interfere every subject's self-injury behavior from various motivations. The main intervention strategy is attention distraction. Results showed that after implementing attention distraction strategy, there is an obvious decrease in number of subjects'self-injury behavior.Comprehensive research results are showed as follows: after execution of functional evaluation, subject's self-injury behavior's function could be found. Self-injury behaviors from various motivations were interfered by using attention distraction strategy. Subject's self-injury behaviors could be effectively reduced by implementing attention distraction strategy. When self-injury behavior's intervention been removed, the intervention results could not be maintained. However, as long as experiment was reasonably designed, attention distraction strategy can be correctly cast in daily life, self-injury behavior can still be reduced, and therefore subject's life quality can be improved. Finally, the restriction of the research in this thesis was discussed and future research advices were proposed.