News and Knowledge

In 2015, OAR’s Board of Directors authorized funding for six new applied autism research studies in 2016. These new grants, totaling $179,827, bring OAR’s total research funding to over $3.5 million since 2002. This is the second of six previews that will be featured in The OARacle over the next few months.

Young adults with autism face significant challenges as they transition to the social and organizational demands of life after high school, including, for example, forming friendships and romantic relationships and interacting with coworkers and supervisors.

OAR-funded researchers Ty Vernon, Ph.D., and Robert Koegel, Ph.D., have designed a social skills program, Social Tools And Rules for Transitions (START), that may help young people deal with those challenges. In their two-year OAR-funded research project, the researchers will evaluate the program to see if the START program project significantly improves participants’ social skills competence.

Investigators

Dr. Vernon is an assistant professor of clinical psychology at the University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) and the director of the Koegel Autism Center Assessment Clinic. Dr. Koegel is the director of the Koegel Autism Center and a professor of clinical psychology and special education at UCSB.

Method

Forty-two young adults between the ages of 18 and 25 will participate in the 20-week program that includes weekly 90-minute sessions. The program will use several novel intervention components, including experiential learning, peer mentorship, social outings and homework. It also includes creative socialization strategies, including same-age peer facilitators, discussion, and social outings.

Using a combination of instruction and natural interactions with a peer group will provide participants with the opportunity to learn by doing. In other words, the program provides a built-in automatic generalization opportunity. Social “homework” in the form of meaningful challenges will also be assigned (based on the group curriculum and individual skill targets).

The program also includes these components:

• Peer mentorship: Trained undergraduate peer facilitators will be paired with participants and plan weekly meetings/social outings outside of the scheduled social group, which will help participants generalize the social skills introduced in the program. These outings also encourage individuals with autism to develop relationships with other peers that may also be present, thus increasing exposure to potential friends. Their weekly meetings, phone calls, and text messages also allow participants to practice relevant real-world skills.

Self-management: The research team will decide on a primary social skill to serve as the initial focus of self-management, such as asking on-topic questions, making positive statements, and limiting conversational contributions. These goals will be re-evaluated at least every five weeks and new skills will be targeted as participants demonstrate adequate mastery of a previous target skill.

Each weekly session will include:

• A five-minute individual check-in with a social facilitator: Each participant reviews social experiences and homework objectives.

• An unstructured 20-minute socialization time: Participants engage in conversation and practice individual target skills. Facilitators will also encourage and praise participants for use of their skills and will manage their own selected social skill to ensure every group member adheres to the same programmatic expectations. Food and refreshments will be provided during each group to aid in the creation of a club-like atmosphere and provide opportunities to give feedback on eating habits.

• A 40-minute topic discussion: This activity provides a chance for participants to review the previous week’s topic and explore the current week’s social skill topic. After the initial introduction—consisting of a brief overview of the social skill—the topic will be illustrated through video clips from popular television shows or live role-plays. Participants will then discuss their experiences related to the social skill and offer suggestions for successful use of that skill. Finally, all group participants then practice the related skill with a partner.

• A 20-minute structured social activity: Engaging in a structured social activity allows participants to build camaraderie and fosters the sharing of personal information while targeting skills related to effective communication, compromise, teamwork, and sportsmanship. Participants will participate in team-building activities and play games like social bingo and Apples to Apples, for example.

• A five-minute checkout session: Each participant and his or her peer facilitator discuss their group experiences, share how they practiced their identified target skill, and receive feedback. The peer facilitator and participant will also jointly establish two social skill homework goals—one based on the individual’s target skill and another based on the weekly topic discussed in the group.

Evaluation

To measure the participants’ social gains, the researchers will use videotapes of conversations with undergraduates unaffiliated with the project to assess interpersonal competence. Objective coding of observable social skills and blinded social impression ratings will be conducted to serve as important dynamic metrics of social improvement.

Self-report survey measures, data from naturalistic conversational probes, and real-world social data will be collected as complementary measures of social competence improvements.

Outcomes

Existing data from a similar program with younger participants indicate that they were rated as significantly more comfortable, more socially skilled, less awkward, and more likely to have friends after completion of the START group. Should this improvement also be found in the proposed young adult social skill model, then the participating adults will have fundamentally changed the way they are perceived by others in their social environment. Such improvements to social confidence and competence have obvious implications for real world social pursuits, such as successful first dates, job interviews, and long-term friendship formation.

Through this project, the researchers will be able to determine which observable social skills are most closely associated with real-world success and favorable first impressions. In turn, they can then further refine the curriculum to teach these identified skills to future participants to optimize their long-term outcomes.