Abstract
While social skills are commonly assessed in autism spectrum disorder (ASD), little is known about individuals’ and families’ beliefs regarding importance of these skills. Seventy-four parents and their children with ASD rated social skills importance and severity, as well as ASD-specific deficit severity. Parents and youth rated social skills as important overall; however, parents reported assertion and self-control to be more important than their children did. Severity and importance did not correlate overall. However, parent-report of responsibility deficits and importance were positively correlated, while youth-report of assertiveness deficits and importance were negatively correlated. Finally, ASD-specific social deficits were positively correlated with parent reported importance, but negatively correlated with child reported importance. Social skills importance ratings merit consideration in ASD assessment.
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Notes
Analyses excluding the 11 participants who either (a) did not meet SRS cutoffs or (b) whose custodial parents are grandparents or adoptive parents yielded a similar pattern of results as those reported below.
Nonetheless, we also examined the same relations using self-reported social skills instead of parent-reported social skills (i.e., the SSRS measure). In these models, results yielded the same pattern of results as those obtained using parent-reported social skills.
This pattern did not differ by age group, with no significant differences found between reports by parents of youth in grades K-6 and youth in grades 7-12.
A nearly identical effect was found for the correlation between child-rated Assertion importance and parent-rated Assertion severity (r = .43, p < .01).
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank the participating families, whose valuable time and dedication made this study possible. This research was partially supported by the Jefferson Scholars’ Foundation, the University of Virginia Center for Children, Families, and the Law, the International Max Planck Research School on the Life Course, and Commonwealth Autism Services to Matthew Lerner. The sponsors of the study had no role in study design, data interpretation, or writing of the report. Portions of these analyses were presented at the 2015 Association for Psychological Science Convention and 2015 Society for Research in Child Development Biennial Meeting.
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Rankin & Lerner contributed to all aspects of data preparation and analysis, and manuscript writing. Lerner conducted data collection. Weber & Kang contributed to manuscript writing, editing, and revision, and literature review.
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Rankin, J.A., Weber, R.J., Kang, E. et al. Parent- and Self-Reported Social Skills Importance in Autism Spectrum Disorder. J Autism Dev Disord 46, 273–286 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-015-2574-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-015-2574-7