Operationalizing the Construct of Social Communication In Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Scoping Review

Background: Social skill deficits distinguish children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) from children with other disabilities. Proposed changes to the DSM-IV may combine the categories of social and communication deficits into ‘social communication’. However, there is no universally accepted meaning for these abilities and challenges for children with ASD. Furthermore, ‘social communication’ may not be synonymous with ‘social responsiveness’, ‘social interactions’, or ‘social impairments’. This scoping review maps how people operationalize ‘social communication’ for children with ASD.

Objectives: To examine the ASD literature to operationalize the characteristics of social communication in children with ASD.

Methods: The research question guiding this review asks: “How is social communication defined and operationalized for children with ASD?” An iterative search strategy will be conducted by first searching electronic bibliographic databases such as, CINAHL, ERIC, PsychInfo, and MEDLINE. For each database, ASD is the major subject heading and “social communication” is the keyword to be identified in the work’s abstract or title. Relevant search hits are those that define and/or operationalize “social communication.” Two reviewers independently assess search results for definitions of social communication and ensure agreement of selected works. Data will be charted using a matrix where definitions of “social communication” are listed by source. These are being extracted according to key concepts and the investigators’ professional backgrounds. A second search is then conducted, using a similar search procedure to identify additional “social” terms arising from the literature to understand their relationship with “social communication”. Other content sources will be examined in this review include publications of measurement tools/checklists, ASD textbooks/clinical materials and internet sites of key ASD stakeholders. All concepts identified from this review will be examined across variables such as the age of the child and DSM-IV diagnosis (i.e., Asperger, autistic disorder) and collated across sources. We expect that common themes will be generated. 

Results: Early results of the first search identified an initial yield of 460 articles. Currently approximately one quarter of these articles have been reviewed, where half are relevant search hits. As articles undergo review, additional search terms for social deficits have accumulated for the second search (e.g., social responsiveness, social interactions, social impairments). Concurrently, the important data from internet sources, books and measurement tools published are being retrieved and further examined for relevance. An early analysis of the selected works describes social communication as the ability to engage and maintain joint attention with communication partners. Other articles define social communication more broadly to include a set of skills in nonverbal (e.g., eye gaze, appropriate physical distance, gestures), speech (e.g., appropriate pitch, prosody, stress), and language (e.g., appropriate speaker and listener tasks) performance.

Conclusions: This scoping review will provide a conceptual map of the construct of social communication. The poster will discuss the results of these analyses as they relate to our understanding of the development of social communication in children with ASD. We will discuss future applications of this work to support the development of a functional classification tool based on social communication patterns in children with ASD.