Assessment of Intervention Effects on in Vivo Peer Interactions in Adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorders

Background: Social skills deficits among individuals with ASD lead to isolation and lack of friendships. The Program for the Education and Enrichment of Relational Skills (PEERS: Laugeson, Frankel, Mogil, & Dillon, 2009) is an empirically based, manualized, outpatient treatment program designed to teach motivated adolescents with developmental delays the social skills needed in order to make and keep friends (Laugeson et al., 2009). To date, there are no known published studies that have assessed the effectiveness of social skills intervention for adolescents with Asperger’s Syndrome (AS) or high functioning autism (HFA) via an observational method. Specifically, previous studies have relied on self-report measures from parents, adolescents, or teachers about the improvement of social skills.

Objectives: The study sought to evaluate the effectiveness of a randomized controlled trial of a social skills intervention program, the Program for the Education and Enrichment of Relational Skills (PEERS), by coding a digitally recorded, in vivo, social interaction between adolescent participants with ASD and a typically developing adolescent.

Methods: The analysis included 45 adolescents (11 to 16 years-old) with ASD. All participants had a verbal IQ > 70 and diagnoses were confirmed with the ADOS. The intervention was the 14-session Program for the Enrichment and Education of Relational Skills (PEERS: Laugeson et al., 2009). Measures were taken at pre-intervention and post-intervention and included: (1) a 10-minute videotaped social interaction with an unfamiliar, typically developing, gender-matched adolescent, and (2) the Test of Adolescent Social Skills(self-report; TASSK; Laugeson & Frankel, 2006). Adolescents’ social interactions were later coded using the Contextual Assessment of Social Skills (CASS: Ratto, Turner-Brown, Rupp, Mesibov, & Penn, 2010).

Results: For the experimental group, adolescents’ in vivo social skills increased from pre- to post- treatment, but these changes did not reach traditional levels of significance. Social skills knowledge, as assessed by the TASSK, demonstrated significant differences between the experimental and waitlist control groups, with the experimental group indicating greater improvements in social skill knowledge at post-treatment (Wilks’ Lambda = 1.57, F(1, 43) = 230.51, p < .05). Planned analyses will include two additional cohorts to further assess the effects of the interaction on the in vivointeractions.

Conclusions: Adolescents receiving the PEERS intervention demonstrated increases in social skill knowledge, and their peer interactions suggested trends toward increases in in vivo social skills. The results of this study added to the minimal literature regarding social skills development in this population, and highlight the importance of observational data.