|
| Area | Recommendations |
|
| Conceptual | (i) Planned analyses should be conceptually based |
| (ii) Models will benefit from including both child-focused and environmental variables when considering the child variable of baseline age |
| (iii) Conceptual models should take into consideration interaction of predictors |
|
| Participants | (i) Be aware of range of intellectual ability and proportion of severity levels present in the sample |
| (ii) Include as broad a sampling as possible in terms of participant ability in cognition, play, language, and autism severity |
| (iii) It would be helpful to have a more consistent definition of early intervention, distinguishing birth-to-three from preschool intervention |
| (iv) School age (5 years and above) should not be considered early intervention |
|
| Measures | (i) When using standardized tests, consider value of age equivalent vs. standardized scores |
| (ii) Explore ways to include children who cannot complete a standardized test |
| (iii) Consider the constructs measured and separate out neuropsychological features such as language-based versus nonlanguage constructs and quotients |
|
| Approach to data analysis | (i) Explore distribution shape of continuous variables and adjust for skewness |
| (ii) Testing of prediction relationships needs to move past zero-order correlations. Since starting age is an important theoretical predictor, lack of significant zero-order correlations may be bypassed for inclusion in further analysis because of the possibility of more complex relationships |
| (iii) Multivariate approaches should control for shared variance among predictors |
| (iv) Consider using statistical tests that are robust to small samples and nonparametric data (e.g., bootstrapping techniques) to minimize the possibility of type I and type II errors |
| (v) Studies with large samples should consider more contemporary statistical approaches such as structural equation modeling in lieu of conducting multiple separate univariate and multivariate regression analyses |
| (vi) Post hoc techniques for understanding the direction and magnitude of influence of age as predictor will be helpful |
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