Friendship Expectations May be Similar for Mental Age-Matched Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder and Typically Developing Children

“They can even make waiting in line fun”: A quantitative content analysis of autistic children's friendship conceptualizations

“…This study contributes to existing evidence illustrating that autistic children conceptualize friendship in varied ways, and share at least some aspects of their conceptualizations with their nonautistic peers (Bottema‐Beutel et al, 2019a, 2019b; Petrina et al, 2017). There are at least two implications of this study for practitioners working to facilitate friendship experiences in autistic youth, as well as for interventions and programming designed to promote social relationships such as friendship.…”

“…Finally, our work suggests that additional, large scale work should be done to develop and validate new quantitative instruments for examining expectations and responses to transgressions for autistic children in this age group. While the expectations used in a previous study conducted on the same sample of students (Bottema‐Beutel et al, 2019a) all emerged in our analyses, we found that none of these expectations were identified by a majority of our autistic participants. Instead of developing more concise measures, a wider, more nuanced set of friendship expectation items may be needed to adequately capture the views of children who hold a diverse range of expectations of their friends.…”

“…Yet, despite some research suggesting that autistic children experience lower quality friendship relative to their nonautistic counterparts (Calder, Hill, & Pellicano, 2013; Kasari, Locke, Gulsrud, & Rotheram‐Fuller, 2011; Solomon, Bauminger, & Rogers, 2011), it has also been shown that autistic children do regard themselves as having friends, and report similar levels of satisfaction with their friendship in comparison with nonautistic peers (Calder et al, 2013; Petrina, Carter, Stephenson, & Sweller, 2017). Importantly, autistic children experience many aspects of friendship much like their nonautistic peers—they want, seek out, describe having friends, rate friendship expectations, and respond to friendship transgressions in similar ways (Bauminger & Kasari, 2000; Bauminger et al, 2008; Bottema‐Beutel, Malloy, Cuda, Kim, & MacEvoy, 2019a, 2019b; Daniel & Billingsley, 2010; Sigman et al, 1999). It should thus be considered that contrasting friendship experiences and conceptualizations in autistic and nonautistic populations are not necessarily problematic or reflective of deficits.…”

“…Recent work has demonstrated that, for elementary school autistic children who were able to access language‐based surveys about friendship expectations and transgressions, a number of friendship expectations and responses to friendship transgressions may be largely similar to those of nonautistic children (Bottema‐Beutel et al, 2019a, 2019b). However, this study also uncovered some notable differences.…”

“…However, this study also uncovered some notable differences. For instance, compared with their nonautistic peers, autistic children may expect more overt expressions of care from their friends (Bottema‐Beutel et al, 2019a), or view verbal aggression as a viable response to a friendship transgression (Bottema‐Beutel et al, 2019b). It should be highlighted that, in this study, researchers relied upon measures developed and normed on nonautistic children, since little work has directly investigated friendship expectations in populations of autistic children.…”