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Friendship and Joint Attention in Preschoolers with ASD
Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have difficulty making friends. Compared to typically-developing children, children with ASD have fewer friendships and their friendships are of lower quality (Bauminger et al., 2008; Kasari, Locke, Gulsrud, Rotheram-Fuller, 2011). Most of these studies examining friendships in children with ASD have focused on elementary and middle-school aged children. Little is known about friendships in younger children with autism, particularly preschool-age.
Objectives:
The current study will examine friendships in preschool children with ASD and explore the role of joint attention in these friendships.
Methods:
Participants included thirty-one fully mainstreamed preschool children (ages 2-5) with ASD. For each participant, two 15-minute school observations were conducted during his/ her free play. These observations were used to capture “friendships” in the preschoolers. Friendship was defined by three criteria used to define friendship in neurotypical preschool children (Howes, 1983): 1) at least 50% of their social initiation attempts were responded to, 2) at least one interval of joint engagement, and 3) at least one positive affective exchange (adapted from Howes, 1983).
The Early Social Communication Scale (ESCS; Mundy et al., 1986) was administered to each participant to assess the child’s spontaneous use of joint attention skills.
Results:
Twenty percent of the children in the sample had friendships. Joint engagement was examined between the two groups of children (children with friendships and children without friendships) during free play. Children who had friends were spending significantly more time in joint engagement (U = 14.00, p < .001), while children without friends were spending more time in parallel play (t(29) = 5.965, p = 0.016). Despite the differences between the two groups, as a group, children in the study sample spent the most time in solitary play (M = 33.71, SD = 24.43).
Two independent sample t-tests were also conducted to examine differences in initiations of joint attention between the two groups. There were no differences in joint attention skills between the two groups (p > .05). However, 86% of the children with friends (n = 6) displayed high level joint attention skills including pointing and showing, whereas only 50% of the children without friends (n = 12) displayed high level joint attention skills.
Conclusions:
The findings from the current study suggest that children with autism can have friendships at a young age. There were qualitative differences between children who were defined to have friendships compared to children who did not have friends. In general, children who had friends were more engaged and had more joint attention skills. This suggests that early intervention targeting joint attention is critical for this population of children. Joint attention interventions may increase early social communication skills and help foster more meaningful relationships (Lawton & Kasari, 2012; Wong & Kasari, 2012).