Nursing Science Day!

Author: Caroline Kilo | Major: Nursing | Semester: Spring 2024

Back in May of 2023, I was given the opportunity to be a part of Dr. Kilmer’s Honors Research team. Two other nursing students and I were chosen to help study the effects of Animal Assisted Therapy (AAT) using Dr. Kilmer’s service dog, Gryffin. Throughout the fall of 2023, we met with Dr. Kilmer weekly to help train and play with Gryffin. Gryffin is the sweetest black lab, who is a certified therapy dog that knows over 30 commands and performs 10 service dog tasks. During that semester, we also wrote our Honors Thesis Proposal. Our thesis title is Analyzing the Effects of Animal Assisted Therapy on Prosocial Behavior and Emotional Regulation in Children at Risk for Autism Spectrum Disorder. Essentially, we are studying how Gryffin benefits children with Autism during their therapy sessions. We are using a realistic stuffed canine, Snuffles, with some of the participants instead of Gryffin. It is important that we investigate and compare the effects of using a live canine vs a plush canine to ensure that the effects of AAT are due to Gryffin and not just from Dr. Kilmer’s therapeutic interventions. While writing our proposal paper, we learned about the basis of AAT and its benefits. The results from past research studies on AAT have already proven to be effective, so we hope to continue filling in the gaps of this amazing research topic.

The spring 2024 semester was filled with learning how to code Human Animal Interaction (HAI) behaviors in therapy session videos. The Organization for Human-Animal Research and Education (OHAIRE) certifies students to code numerous behaviors throughout the videos, such as interactive behaviors (social communication and environmental interaction), emotional display (facial and verbal), and interfering behaviors (aggression, isolation, and overactivity). We use Qualtrics surveys to record our OHAIRE coding data. We also separately learned to code using the John Hopkins University 3 AAT Observation Ethogram to evaluate both human and canine behavior. We insert this coded data into an Excel spreadsheet, and a statistician will later quantify our data. Dr. Kilmer records the therapy sessions with the research participants, so we are able to see how they interact with Dr. Kilmer and either Gryffin or Snuffles. It is eye-opening to see how much progress the children make throughout the sessions and how much they adore Gryffin. We also attended Nursing Science Day with Dr. Kilmer since the symposium theme was “The State of the Science for Animal-Assisted Therapy: Implications for Research, Education, and Practice Across the HealthCare Continuum”. The symposium was filled with captivating presentations, and we even got to meet the keynote speaker, Dr. Temple Grandin.

Next semester, we will be coding more videos, analyzing our data, writing our final paper, and defending our thesis. I am so thankful to be a part of this research project with Dr. Kilmer, Gryffin, and our other group members. Dr. Kilmer is truly doing groundbreaking research that will open new doors for Animal Assisted Therapy. I look forward to next semester and continuing our research!