Scholars@Duke
Lauren Franz

Lauren Franz

Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
Psychiatry, Child & Family Mental Health & Community Psychiatry
lauren.franz@duke.edu
Box 3837 Med Ctr, Durham, NC 27710
Dept of Psychiatry, Durham, NC 27710

Featured Works

Using clinical notes to identify children with speech-language delay and understand differences in diagnostic timing.

Journal article JAMIA Open · June 2026 Featured Publication OBJECTIVE: Speech-language delay (SLD) is a developmental condition often identified by pediatricians. While early intervention is recommended, it is common for pediatricians to take a "watch and wait" approach. We sought to assess whether there is discord ... Full text Link to item Cite

Tele-delivered caregiver coaching for autism in South Africa – A mixed-methods study of acceptability, appropriateness and feasibility

Journal article Digital Health · January 1, 2026 Featured Publication Objective: Tele-delivered interventions can benefit autistic children and families in low-resource settings, but the digital divide may worsen existing disparities. To address this, we adapted a Naturalistic Developmental Behavioural Intervention (NDBI)-ba ... Full text Cite

Early intervention for very young children with or at high likelihood for autism spectrum disorder: An overview of reviews.

Journal article Dev Med Child Neurol · September 2022 Featured Publication AIM: To identify which interventions are supported by evidence and the quality of that evidence in very young children with or at high likelihood for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) to improve child outcomes. METHOD: We conducted an overview of reviews to s ... Full text Link to item Cite

Pragmatic adaptations of telehealth-delivered caregiver coaching for children with autism in the context of COVID-19: Perspectives from the United States and South Africa.

Journal article Autism · January 2022 Featured Publication COVID-19 caused many autism spectrum disorder caregiver-coaching studies to move to telehealth. Telehealth can increase the diversity of people who take part in research. This matters because most autism spectrum disorder studies have included people who h ... Full text Link to item Cite

Educational classifications of autism spectrum disorder and intellectual disability among school-aged children in North Carolina: Associations with race, rurality, and resource availability.

Journal article Autism Res · May 2021 Featured Publication Disparities exist in the recognition of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and intellectual disability (ID) in racial/ethnic minorities in the United States. This study examined whether rurality, race/ethnicity, and low resource availability are associated wit ... Full text Link to item Cite

Sustainable implementation of early intervention for autism spectrum disorder through caregiver coaching: South African perspectives on barriers and facilitators

Journal article Pediatric Medicine · August 1, 2019 Featured Publication Background: A lack of specialists, and insufficient infrastructure and funding to scale early interventions for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) characterize low-resource settings. Integration of early intervention methods that utilize non-specialists, and i ... Full text Open Access Cite

Caregiver descriptions of joint activity routines with young children with autism spectrum disorder in South Africa.

Journal article Pediatr Med · March 2019 Featured Publication BACKGROUND: Coaching caregivers to deliver Naturalistic Developmental Behavioral Intervention (NDBI) strategies to their young child with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) could help address the provider capacity barrier in sub-Saharan Africa. However, the be ... Full text Open Access Link to item Cite

The importance of context in early autism intervention: A qualitative South African study.

Journal article Autism · November 2018 Featured Publication The majority of individuals with autism spectrum disorder live in low- and middle-income countries and receive little or no services from health or social care systems. The development and validation of autism spectrum disorder interventions has almost exc ... Full text Link to item Cite

Providing early detection and early intervention for autism spectrum disorder in South Africa: stakeholder perspectives from the Western Cape province.

Journal article J Child Adolesc Ment Health · November 2018 Featured Publication We set out to examine key stakeholder perspectives on early detection and intervention for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in South Africa. Early detection and intervention improves child and family outcomes and lessens long-term costs. We focused on stakeh ... Full text Link to item Cite

Autism spectrum disorder in sub-saharan africa: A comprehensive scoping review.

Journal article Autism Res · May 2017 Featured Publication Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is recognized as a global public health concern, yet almost everything we know about ASD comes from high-income countries. Here we performed a scoping review of all research on ASD ever published in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) i ... Full text Link to item Cite