News and Knowledge

In 2013, OAR’s Board of Directors authorized funding for seven new applied autism research studies in 2014. This additional $210,000 in research grants brought the total funds awarded by OAR to over $3 million since its first grants in January 2003. This review is the third in a series of seven that will appear in The OARacle over the next few months.

For all children and adolescents, social skills play a huge role in determining success at school, and their importance carries into (and arguably becomes more important during) adulthood. Social skills are at the core of our ability to form friendships, romantic relationships, and succeed professionally. Most of us don’t have to think much about developing social skills; they’re something we learn as part of the natural maturation process.

But it’s not necessarily that easy for young people with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). That’s why OAR-funded researchers Robert Koegel, Ph.D., and Ty Vernon, Ph.D., BCBA-D, at the Koegel Autism Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara, are testing a group-based intervention for teens that includes the use of peers as social facilitators. Their study, “A Peer-Facilitated, Multi-Component Social Skills Intervention for Adolescents with ASD,” is already underway.

By reviewing scholarly literature on social skills, the researchers first identified the “essential ingredients” for a model program: naturalistic skill practice with peers, individual social objectives, opportunities for generalization, and collaboration with parents. Their study will examine the effectiveness of a social skills intervention that combines several of these components into a peer-facilitated group training program. The group format mirrors a typical after-school club. The opportunity to interact with same-aged peers and jointly work on social skills is likely to be much better received by adolescents on the spectrum than a social skills group facilitated by adult professionals.

The researchers will identify 42 participants for the two-year study. Participants will take part in 20 total group sessions, each lasting approximately 90 minutes. Each session will include an individual check-in session, unstructured socialization time, a group activity, a group discussion of a social skill topic, and an individual check-out session with parent involvement.

Supervised high school students will be recruited from local schools to facilitate each group. These volunteers will receive a 10-hour training on basic group facilitation techniques, covering basic counseling skills, methods for fostering rapport, and exposure to practice group sessions. The peer facilitators will also participate in weekly one-hour supervision meetings prior to that week’s intervention group.

The success of the training will be evaluated through assessments given at six different times (pre-intervention, after every five sessions of group participation, post-intervention, and at a 20-week follow-up time-period). The assessments will measure social skill acquisition, changes in naturalistic conversation, and outside social encounters. Participants and parents will also fill out surveys.

The researchers expect that the study will offer results similar to or better than existing social skills programs run by adult professionals for adolescents. The researchers believe that this training method is more likely to be attractive to adolescents with ASD since they will be working and interacting with their peers rather than professionals. In addition, it provides for such training at a lower cost and with wider possibility for replication in other places.