Describing the adaptive behavior of children with Down syndrome who received early intervention measured by the Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scales: A trend analysis

The purpose of this study was to investigate the trends across developmental domains for a specific group of children with Down syndrome who received early intervention from an integrated intervention program. The study explored the measurement between four different developmental domains: communication, socialization, daily living skills, and motor skills, and with 11 sub-domains: receptive language, expressive language, written language, personal, domestic and community skills, interpersonal relationships, play and leisure time, coping skills, gross motor skills and fine motor skills. The independent variables were gender, age, school and time and the dependent variables were the developmental test results. In this study, standardized results from a developmental assessment contributed to understanding how young children with Down syndrome compare developmentally to each other based on age and gender across time and how they compared developmentally to the sample population in a national study.

The study employed quantitative methods to identify specific trends as they related to the developmental domains and sub-domains. The Vineland Adaptive Behavior Scale was used to gather the required developmental scores. The participants for this study consisted of 81 children with Down syndrome ages 18 months to 6 years. The data came from existing test scores from three different non-profit early intervention preschools located in Tuscaloosa, Alabama; Dallas, Texas; and Houston, Texas. Each participant had at least three years of developmental test scores for use in this study allowing the test results to be measured over a three year period of time.

According to the results for this study, across all participants from all three schools and all three times, the results of the motor skills domain were significantly lower than the communication, daily living skills and socialization domains. The children in the current study scored lower than the children used in the national study performed by the authors of the Vineland in all areas of development. For the participants who received intense therapy from the early intervention program, after two years of speech therapy, occupational therapy, physical therapy and music therapy their standard scores, percentile ranks and stanine scores remained unchanged.