LEGO building materials have been adapted as a therapeutic modality for increasing motivation to participate in social skills intervention, and providing a medium through which children with social and communication handicaps can effectively interact. A 3 year retrospective study of long-term outcome for autistic spectrum children participating in LEGO therapy (N = 60) compared Vineland Adaptiv...

BACKGROUND Parents of children with cerebral palsy (CP) often experience high levels of stress. Little is known however on the different sources of stress parents experience. The purpose of the present study was to explore the relation between aspects of parental distress in the parenting role and the child's limitations in functional skills and the child's behavioural difficulties, in parents ...

The importance of emotional aspects in developing cognitive and social abilities has already been underlined by many authors even if there is no unanimous agreement on the factors constituting adaptive abilities, nor is there any on the way to measure them or on the relation between adaptive ability and cognitive level. The purposes of this study was to test the psychometric characteristics of ...

Nowadays, Value engineering (V.E.) is considered as a tool of construction management that can help companies to improve their procedures, services and final products regarding the client’s needs, as an end user, with respect to time, cos t and quality. The V.E. process has evolved from previous methods based on the concept of value and functional approach. These methods were pioneered by Lawre...

OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to establish the construct validity of the Focus on the Outcomes of Communication Under Six (FOCUS©). This measure is reflective of concepts in the International Classification of Functioning Disability and Health--Children and Youth framework. It was developed to capture 'real-world' changes (e.g. communicative participation) in preschoolers' communication f...

In this paper, I show that scales (or hierarchies) have been appealed to in various functions: They have been used to formulate descriptive generalizations (on a single language), and to formulate cross-linguistic generalizations. They have also been used for binary relations, and for implicational relations among more than two items on the scale. This yields four uses of scales (descriptive re...

The literature offers no descriptions of the adaptive outcomes of people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) after natural disasters. Aim of this study was to evaluate the adaptive behaviour of participants with ASD followed for 1 year after their exposure to the 2009 earthquake in L'Aquila (Italy) compared with an unexposed peer group with ASD, by administering the Italian form of the Vineland...

Relative survival provides a measure of the proportion of patients dying from the disease under study without requiring the knowledge of the cause of death. We propose an overall strategy based on regression models to estimate the relative survival and model the effects of potential prognostic factors. The baseline hazard was modelled until 10 years follow-up using parametric continuous functio...

Relative survival is a method for assessing prognostic factors for disease-specific mortality. However, most relative survival models assume that the effect of covariate on disease-specific mortality is fixed-in-time, which may not hold in some studies and requires adapted modelling. We propose an extension of the Esteve et al. regressive relative survival model that uses the counting process a...