1 Division of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, University of Cape Town, South Africa.
2 Adolescent Health Research Unit, University of Cape Town, South Africa.
Autism. 2019 Apr;23(3):542-555. doi: 10.1177/1362361318760295. Epub 2018 Mar 29.
EarlyBird and EarlyBird Plus are parent education and training programmes designed by the UK National Autistic Society in 1997 and 2003, having been delivered to more than 27,000 families in 14 countries. These group-based programmes aim to (1) support parents immediately after diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder, (2) empower parents, encouraging a positive perception of their child's autism spectrum disorder and (3) help parents establish good practice. In the absence of any previous comprehensive review, we performed a scoping review of all peer-reviewed publications on EarlyBird/EarlyBird Plus. A search was conducted between February and June 2016 using EbscoHost, Sabinet, SAGE Journals, Directory of Open Access Journals, BioMed Central, Scopus, ScienceDirect and grey literature. Two reviewers independently screened titles and abstracts for inclusion. In total, 18 articles were identified: 16 from the United Kingdom and 2 from New Zealand. We reviewed the context, study populations, design, outcome measures, whether focus was on parental perception, parental change or child changes and programme feasibility. Strong parental support for the acceptability but lower level evidence of efficacy of EarlyBird/EarlyBird Plus was found. Future research should consider randomised controlled trials. There is no research on EarlyBird/EarlyBird Plus in low-resource settings; therefore, we recommend broader feasibility evaluation of EarlyBird/EarlyBird Plus including accessibility, cultural appropriateness and scalability.
早鸟和早鸟 Plus 是英国国家自闭症协会于 1997 年和 2003 年设计的家长教育和培训计划，已经在 14 个国家为超过 27000 个家庭提供了服务。这些基于小组的计划旨在：（1）在自闭症谱系障碍诊断后立即为家长提供支持；（2）赋予家长权力，鼓励他们对孩子的自闭症谱系障碍有积极的认识；（3）帮助家长建立良好的实践。由于缺乏以前的全面审查，我们对早鸟/早鸟 Plus 的所有同行评审出版物进行了范围审查。2016 年 2 月至 6 月，我们使用 EbscoHost、Sabinet、SAGE 期刊、开放获取期刊目录、生物医学中心、Scopus、ScienceDirect 和灰色文献进行了搜索。两位评审员独立筛选标题和摘要以确定是否纳入。共确定了 18 篇文章：其中 16 篇来自英国，2 篇来自新西兰。我们审查了背景、研究人群、设计、结果衡量标准、重点是否放在父母的看法、父母的变化还是孩子的变化以及计划的可行性上。研究发现，家长强烈支持早鸟/早鸟 Plus 的可接受性，但对其疗效的证据水平较低。未来的研究应考虑随机对照试验。在资源匮乏的环境中没有关于早鸟/早鸟 Plus 的研究；因此，我们建议对早鸟/早鸟 Plus 进行更广泛的可行性评估，包括可及性、文化适宜性和可扩展性。
