Animal-assisted therapy and the severely disabled child: a quantitative study - Graduate Literary Award Winner - Abstract

Journal of Rehabilitation, Oct-Dec, 2001 by Kathryn Heimlich

Three members of Hope School's certified staff developed baselines for each child prior to the therapy sessions. The students were evaluated on four variables including attention span, physical movement, communication and compliance. The raters observed the children for a three-week period before the beginning of the therapy sessions on each variable to establish the baselines. One animal (Cody) and the same handler delivered the structured therapy program over the eight sessions to each child. Behavioral outcomes were measured outside of the therapeutic setting. T-Test analysis was used to describe changes in the afore-mentioned variables over the eight-week period. In addition, the same statistical analysis was applied to the two administrations of the Child Behavior Checklist as scored by the objective raters.

Research information was collected from the three designated raters that worked with the students at Hope School. The raters included a speech pathologist/technology specialist, a vision/hearing disability specialist and an adaptive physical education teacher. The raters were asked to complete the Measurement of Pet Intervention (MOPI) weekly for three weeks prior to the beginning of the treatment program to establish a baseline for student functioning. Then once the treatment began, the raters were asked to continue with the MOPI form for the remaining eight weeks for the seven designated students in the program. In addition, the raters were asked to complete the Direct Observation Form (DOF) AND The Teacher's Report Form (TRF) of the Child Behavior Checklist (CBC) and The Behavior Dimensions Rating Scale (BDRS) for the first week of treatment and the last week of treatment. Only two trials were actually completed, and only the first produced a complete data set.

After the collection of the first set of data, it was determined that inter-rater reliability was quite low for the measures used. For the MOPI, one of the three raters' evaluations was much more inflated than the other two. There was a fairly high consistency between two of the three raters, partial correlation values of .70 to .89 across the treatment period. For the Direct Observation Form and the Teacher's Report Form, there was discrepancy between the raters regarding which test questions were valid and appropriate for the students in question. Given that the inter-rater reliability was low, all observations had to be treated as independent occurrences. Based on mean comparisons, there was no effect of age or sex on the MOPI scale.

Results

On analyzing all 14 of the students who participated in the animal-assisted therapy program, the bulk of the data suggest that there was a movement of ratings in the positive direction with onset of treatment and the duration of treatment across most students for all raters. Rater 1 documented positive effects for 12 out of the 14 students, whereas Rater 2 documented positive effects for 9 out of the 14 students, and finally Rater 3 documented positive effects for 7 out of the 14 students.