Early Intensive Behavioral Interventions: Selecting behaviors for treatment and assessing treatment effectiveness

•Early Intensive Behavioral Interventions should prioritize the many behaviors that are treated.•Researchers do not currently describe methods for prioritizing target behaviors.•Method used to measure treatment outcome in EIBI vary widely.

Early Intensive Behavioral Interventions (EIBI) is well established as the most effective treatment for young children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). A hallmark of this intervention model is the bundling of multiple behaviors simultaneously for intervention. With the addition of various comorbid problems such as challenging behaviors and psychopathology, it becomes incumbent on clinicians to prioritize behaviors for intervention. Based on the studies conducted to date, little has been done in this regard. Additionally, general measures of ASD, adaptive behavior and cognitive functioning are primarily used to assess outcomes, many of these measures were not designed to assess treatment effects, and little evidence is available to link intervention to specific items on these scales.