Ayres' Sensory Integration
Dr A. Jean Ayres was an Occupational Therapist, who completed postgraduate education in psychology. She was the first person to suggest difficulties registering, interpreting and responding to sensory information could interfere with activities of everyday life, calling her newly developing theory ‘sensory integration’. She also clearly described ‘sensory integration dysfunction’ and developed ways to assess and address these difficulties, calling it ‘sensory integration therapy’. Ayres’ SI is rooted in and was developed out of occupational therapy and remains primarily an Occupational Therapy Domain of Practice.
Ayres’ Sensory Integration®[1] (ASI) has been trademarked to describe when people use the theory, ways of assessing and doing the therapy that she first developed. Time has passed since she did this work in the 1950s and 1960s. Her theory has continued to be built on, evidenced by supporting neuroscience.
Assessment
Therapists use Ayres’ Sensory Integration as part of comprehensive profession-specific clinical reasoning, using the ideas and theories that have grown out of her work to describe sensory strengths and challenges and how these contribute to an individual's participation in everyday life. When they do this, they are using the body of knowledge of Ayres’ Sensory Integration and research. This includes ways of assessing sensory integration and processing challenges and difficulties, underpinning hypothesis generation to understand, describe and make links between how a person integrates sensory information, and how this impacts on the person’s participation in everyday life.
Intervention
Ayres’ Sensory Integration® Therapy (ASI) is used specifically to describe the intervention method that Jean Ayres developed, “individually tailored sensory motor activities contextualised in play” [2](Schaaf and Mailloux 2015, p.105). A tool called the ASI Fidelity Tool[3] gives therapists a way of thinking about and outcome measurement how closely what they do is true to the ideas and therapy principles developed by Ayres and her successors. The use of the ASI Fidelity Tool (Parham et al. 2011) is improving research methodology; providing a ‘manualised therapy’ able to be clearly described and defined in current research and reflective clinical practice.
Ayres’ early research not only informed the development of her theory, it also had significant impact on the early development of the profession of Occupational Therapy, with terms she defined now common in professional and even everyday language.
References
- ↑ Ayres, A. Jean (1972). Sensory integration and learning disorders. Los Angeles, Calif.: Western Psychological Services. ISBN 0-87424-303-3. OCLC 590960. Search this book on
- ↑ "Clinician's Guide for Implementing Ayres Sensory Integration: ® Promoting Participation for Children With Autism". myaota.aota.org. Retrieved 2021-05-09.
- ↑ May-Benson, Teresa A.; Roley, Susanne Smith; Mailloux, Zoe; Parham, L. Diane; Koomar, Jane; Schaaf, Roseann C.; Van Jaarsveld, Annamarie; Cohn, Ellen (2014-09-01). "Interrater Reliability and Discriminative Validity of the Structural Elements of the Ayres Sensory Integration®Fidelity Measure©". American Journal of Occupational Therapy. 68 (5): 506–513. doi:10.5014/ajot.2014.010652. ISSN 0272-9490. PMC 4153552. PMID 25184462.
This article "Ayres' Sensory Integration" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:Ayres' Sensory Integration. Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.
