Group Rehabilitation Program for Undergraduate Students Improves Their Social Adaptation Ability and Prevents Their Dropouts.

Background: Group rehabilitation for undergraduate and grad students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has not been established in Japan while that for adults has already been approved as a health insurance treatment. A previous study has shown that substantial number of undergraduate students with ASD unfortunately dropped out of their school and consequently being socially isolated because they could not ask for any effective supports around them in Japan (Takei et al. 2014). This result raises the possibility that developing a group rehabilitation program specialized for undergraduates could prevent their maladjustment to school life. Thus, it is necessary to develop a group rehabilitation program for undergraduates and evaluate its outcomes.

Objectives: We aim to evaluate how effective our group rehabilitation program specialized for undergraduate students is, utilizing longitudinal data that measures the degree of social adaptation.

Methods: We recruited 45 undergraduates with ASD who participated in our group rehabilitation program specialized especially for undergraduate students from July 2015 to June 2018. Our monthly one-year rehabilitation program included communication skill training and psychological education partly specialized for undergraduates (e.g. a role-play session about how to ask for professors and make friends with classmates). Out of 45 participants we analyzed the data of 30 participants (4 female; mean age=20.7, SD = 2.0) who attended more than half of our rehabilitation sessions because we aimed to strictly evaluate the effectiveness of our program throughout a series of sessions and indeed we could not follow up the data of remaining 15 students. We used social adaptation self-evaluation scale (SASS) as a primary end point.

Results: We compared the scores in modified version of SASS for students completed at pre-intervention with those at post-intervention. A t-test showed that the scores of SASS at post-intervention was significantly higher than those at pre-intervention (t = 2.68, p = 0.01), which means that participants improved social functioning after the rehabilitation program. In fact, their outcomes after intervention were as follows: 17 participants were in school, 4 participants obtained jobs, 3 participants participated in employee assistance program, and 6 participants participated in other rehabilitation programs in our hospital after graduation. It was notable that no participant dropped out of their school.

Conclusions: Our preliminary results indicate that our group rehabilitation program specialized for undergraduates could help participants to be well adapted to their school life and consequently not to drop out of their school and be socially isolated.