UF autism researcher receives $1.1 million in NIH funding

August 22, 2005

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — A University of Florida autism researcher whose program focuses on the in-home training of fathers to better communicate and play with their autistic children recently received $1.1 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health.

Jennifer Elder, an associate professor and department chair in the UF College of Nursing, will lead a four-year study that will expand training to help fathers learn to communicate more effectively with their autistic children. Autism is a developmental disability that typically appears during the first three years of life and is characterized by problems interacting and communicating with others.

Elder’s previous study found that teaching fathers how to talk to and play with their autistic children in a home setting improved communication, increased the number of intelligible words the youngsters spoke by more than 50 percent and helped fathers get more involved in their care.

Elder and her research team plan to continue their research with a larger group of fathers and fine-tune the interventions used. They also plan to evaluate the effectiveness of showing fathers how to train their spouses in the techniques. In addition, the team will note the effects of father training on parental stress and family cohesion.

In addition, the team is developing a Web site so training “booster” sessions can be broadcast via the Internet to a subset of participating fathers. Fathers will be able to view these training sessions and hear comments on how to improve upon their play sessions with their children.

“In addition to answering important questions related to autism, interventions and procedural methods in our proposed work may have wider applications and prove critical in developing future research with a variety of challenging childhood disorders,” Elder said.