The Sharland Foundation Developmental Disabilities ABA Research and Impact Network (SF-DDARIN)

Project management group includes: Dr Peter Baker, Dr Nick Gore plus members from other collaborative centres
Network members: Professor Peter McGill, Dr Ciara Padden, Serena Tomlinson
Research team member: Viki Stafford

Research

Aims
The Sharland Foundation Developmental Disabilities ABA Research and Impact Network (SF-DDARIN) is funded by the Sharland Foundation and collaboration between CEDAR at the University of Warwick, Tizard Centre at the University of Kent, Bangor University and the University of Ulster. SF-DDARIN is a network of like-minded research practitioners. Its overarching purpose is to increase the reach and impact of ABA-based interventions for children and adults with intellectual disabilities and/or autism to support their independence and increased quality of life.

We hope to achieve this through four strongly inter-linked areas of work:

High-quality research 
Working with colleagues and organisations in the UK we will lead the development of research grant applications, in three areas of ABA-related developmental disabilities research:

• Teaching skills including pre-school and academic skills to children and young people, primarily in school contexts
• Teaching skills to adults including health and wellbeing
• PBS across the life-span

Influencing professionals
We aim to influence non-ABA professionals through the publication of case studies, clinical examples, and programme descriptions of programmes that can address common problems faced when working with children or adults with developmental disabilities. We will identify examples of good practice and support their dissemination mainly in articles for professional journals. These professional articles (potentially published instead via social media such as blogs) will avoid the use of technical ABA language.

Special projects
The core Network team will engage with collaborators to facilitate and/or lead projects of national significance designed to improve access of people with developmental disabilities to evidence-based
ABA interventions and to skilled ABA practitioners.

Social and mainstream media
All of the Network’s outputs and projects are regularly fed into social and mainstream media outlets to generate as much positive press for ABA and developmental disabilities as possible.