Abstract
Adolescents with autism spectrum disorder often do not have access to crucial peer social activities. This study examines how typically developing adolescents evaluate decisions not to include a peer based on disability status, and the justifications they apply to these decisions. A clinical interview methodology was used to elicit judgments and justifications across four contexts. We found adolescents are more likely to judge the failure to include as acceptable in personal as compared to public contexts. Using logistic regression, we found that adolescents are more likely to provide moral justifications as to why failure to include is acceptable in a classroom as compared to home, lab group, and soccer practice contexts. Implications for intervention are also discussed.
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Acknowledgments
The first author received partial support in writing this manuscript from IES Grant No. R324B080005 and OSEP Grant No. H325D060036. We would like to thank the adolescents that participated in this research, Rose Cartwright and Christina Jones for their diligent work on this project, Jennifer Gilbert for statistical consultation, and Elliot Turiel for comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript. We would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback.
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Bottema-Beutel, K., Li, Z. Adolescent Judgments and Reasoning About the Failure to Include Peers with Social Disabilities. J Autism Dev Disord 45, 1873–1886 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-014-2348-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-014-2348-7