A Parent-Implemented Playdate Intervention for Young Children With Autism and Their Peers

Abstract

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) present with social skills difficulties, which can create barriers for them to develop friendships with their peers. Playdates are a common way that young children practice play and friendship skills in home and community environments. Few studies have trained parents to embed social skills instruction into playdates for children with ASD, and such studies have been comprised of children with mild to moderate needs. In the current study, we employed a concurrent single-case multiple probe across three parent–child–peer triads design to evaluate the effects of training and coaching in a parent-implemented playdate intervention on parental strategy use and cascading effects on child–peer social interactions during playdates. Parents also rated the social validity of the intervention. Results indicated that two of the three parents reached criterion on the strategies quickly, and the third triad required a procedural modification. Challenging behavior appeared to be a barrier to implementation. Implications and future directions are discussed.

Least-to-Most Prompting in Teaching Social Interaction and Communication Skills to Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Systematic Review

“…A master student and an occupational therapist (Lund & Troha, 2008), a teacher assistant (Xin & Leonard, 2015), a peer (Thiemann-Bourque et al, 2016), both a peer and the researcher (Hansen et al, 2019) were also among the implementers. Parents were the implementers in three studies (Erturk et al, 2020;Hansen et al, 2018;Raulston et al, 2019), and mother and researcher in one study (Van Der Meer et al, 2013).…”

“…Of the studies reviewed, 12 (e.g., Tetreault & Lerman, 2010) were conducted in a clinical setting, 14 (e.g., Lund & Troha, 2008) in classroom and two in school (Queiroz et al, 2020;Xin & Leonard, 2015). Five of the studies took place in home setting (Armendariz & Hahs, 2019;Erturk et al, 2020;Raulston et al, 2019;Topuz & Ülke-Kürkçüoğlu, 2019;Wilson et al, 2017) while two in both class and home (Cannella-Malone et al, 2010;Van Der Meer et al, 2013).…”

“…21 studies measured only one dependent variable while the rest targeted more than two. The studies determining one dependent variable targeted manding (Alzyrayer et al, 2017;Alzyrayer et al, 2019;Lund & Troha, 2008;Raulston et al, 2019;Roche et al, 2014;Schaefer-Whitby et al, 2019), asking questions (Huskens et al, 2013), play skills (Barton et al, 2019;Kourassanis et al, 2015;Quigley et al, 2018;Ülke-Kürkçüoğlu, 2015) receptive language (Curiel et al, 2016), joint attention (Hansen et al, 2018;Hansen et al, 2019), communicating through technology-aided instruction (Finke et al, 2017), social communication for job (Walsh et al, 2018) and initiating interaction (Charlop & Greenberg, 2009) skills. Nine studies targeted greeting and waving hands (Thiemann & Goldstein, 2004), manding and thanking (Waddington et al, 2014), play and communication skills (Barton, 2015;Barton et al, 2018), commenting and responding (D'Agostino et al, 2018), receptive language and manding (Ninci et al, 2018), initiating and elaborating interaction (Topuz & Ülke-Kürkçüoğlu, 2019).…”

“…In 13 studies of 19, LTM was used with other method(s) or technique(s) (e.g., Kern et al, 2007;Ülke-Kürkçüoğlu, 2015). In these studies, LTM was used with song (Kern et al, 2007), PECS (Cannella-Malone et al, 2010;Schaefer-Whitby et al, 2019;Thiemann-Bourque et al, 2016) contingent imitation (Barton, 2015), constant time delay and differential reinforcement (Alzrayer et al, 2017), activity schedule, reinforcement and modeling (Barton et al, 2018), social stories and milieu teaching (Raulston et al, 2019), progressive time delay, prompting and differential reinforcement (Alzrayer et al, 2020). On the other hand, LTM was used alone in the studies where it was implemented in some parts of the teaching procedure.…”

“…Twenty-three of the studies measured maintenance (e.g., Armendariz & Hahs, 2019;Walsh et al, 2018;Raulston et al, 2019) while 12 did not report information regarding to maintenance or follow-up (e.g., Schaefer-Whitby et al, 2019).…”