22083
The Relationship Between Friendship Quality, Companionship and Social Engagement in Adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorder
Impaired social functioning among youth with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) may lead to lack of social engagement, companionship, and poor friendship quality (Orsmond, Krauss, & Seltzer, 2004; Bauminger & Kasari, 2000). Greater friendship quality has been associated with fewer social problems, and less internalizing or externalizing problem behaviors. Having at least one close friend has been shown to be a protective factor against peer victimization and better overall adjustment in adolescents (Waldrip, Malcolm, & Jensen-Campbell, 2008). Children with ASD often report having friendships in school settings, but these friendships are often focused on circumscribed interests with little outside social engagement (Church, Alisanski, & Amanullah, 2000). Despite the growing research examining the social functioning of school-aged children with ASD, little is known about the friendship quality and social engagement in older youth (Macintosh & Dissanayake, 2006).
Objectives:
The present study seeks to address this research gap by examining the relationship between friendship quality and social engagement among adolescents with ASD in school settings.
Methods:
Participants included 106 adolescents (males=86; females=20) ranging from 12-18 years of age (M=15.08; SD=1.82) at The Help Group’s Village Glen School, a nonpublic school for youth with ASD. Participants were involved in a larger treatment outcome study investigating the effectiveness of the PEERS® school based curriculum (Laugeson 2014). In order to examine the relationship between friendship quality and social engagement, adolescents completed the Friendship Quality Scale (FQS; Bukowski, Hoza, & Bolvin, 1994) at baseline, which assesses overall friendship quality along the domains of companionship, helpfulness, closeness, conflict, and security. Additionally, in order to assess social engagement, adolescents completed the Quality of Socialization Questionnaire (QSQ; Frankel & Mintz, 2008) prior to treatment. The QSQ measures the number of hosted and invited get-togethers and degree of conflict during get-togethers in the previous month. Pearson correlation coefficients were calculated to examine the relationship between friendship quality on the FQS and social engagement using the QSQ.
Results:
Results indicate that higher baseline total scores on the FQS are correlated with higher baseline scores on the QSQ frequency of invited get-togethers (p<.05), and with lower baseline scores on the QSQ conflict scale (p<.05). In addition to these findings, companionship on the FQS is correlated with higher baseline scores of frequency of invited get-togethers (p<.001) and hosted get-togethers (p<.001) on the QSQ. Higher baseline companionship scores on the FQS are also correlated with lower baseline scores on the QSQ conflict scale (p<.002). No other statistically significant correlations across the subscales of the FQS and QSQ were found.
Conclusions:
These findings suggest that adolescents with ASD that report greater friendship quality and demonstrate higher companionship are more likely to be social engaged with their peers, and experience less conflict within their friendships. These results suggest that when the treatment priority is to increase social engagement and decrease conflict, the need for more targeted interventions to improve friendship quality and companionship may be warranted.