“I Met Someone Like Me!”: Autistic Adolescents and Their Parents’ Experience of the KONTAKT® Social Skills Group Training

The Methodological Quality and Intervention Fidelity of Randomised Controlled Trials Evaluating Social Skills Group Programs in Autistic Adolescents: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis

“…Of the 18 studies, eight (41%) detailed the flow of participants through their studies in CONSORT diagrams (Afsharnejad et al, 2021a(Afsharnejad et al, , 2021bChoque Olsson et al, 2017;Jonsson et al, 2018;Schohl et al, 2014;Shum et al, 2019;Vernon et al, 2018;White et al, 2013). Overall, included studies demonstrated good to strong methodological quality (i.e., scores of > 75% as assessed via the Kmet Checklist).…”

“…Overall, the included studies (k = 18) evaluated seven unique manualised SSGPs delivered to autistic youth with IQ > 70, including (a) Program for the Education and Enrichment of Relationship Skills (PEERS®; k = 8; Laugeson et al, 2009;Matthews et al, 2018;Matthews et al, 2020;Rabin et al, 2018;Schohl et al, 2014;Shum et al, 2019;Van Hecke et al, 2015;Yoo et al, 2014), (b) KONTAKT® (k = 3;Choque Olsson et al, 2017;Jonsson et al, 2018), (c) SENSE Theatre® (k = 2; Corbett et al, 2016;Corbett et al, 2019), (d) Social Tools and Rules for Teens (START; k = 2; Ko et al, 2019;Vernon et al, 2018), (e) Multimodal Anxiety and Social Skills Program (MASSI; k = 1; White et al, 2013), (f) Sociodramatic Affective Relational Intervention (SDARI; k = 1; Lerner & Mikami, 2012), and (g) SOSTA-FRA (k = 1; Freitag et al, 2016). The majority of the studies were conducted in the United States of America (USA; 65%), with the remainder undertaken in Australia (Afsharnejad et al, 2021a(Afsharnejad et al, , 2021b, China (Shum et al, 2019), Germany (Freitag et al, 2016), Israel (Rabin et al, 2018, Korea (Yoo et al, 2014) and Sweden (Choque Olsson et al, 2017;Jonsson et al, 2018).…”

“…The number of sessions varied across SSGPs, with the shortest program delivered over four sessions (Lerner & Mikami, 2012). The longest SSGP, KONTAKT®, was delivered over twentyfour sessions (Jonsson et al, 2018), being an extension of a shorter 12-session (Choque Olsson et al, 2017) and medium 16-session variants (Afsharnejad et al, 2021a(Afsharnejad et al, , 2021b. Sessions were commonly delivered to small groups of between 3 to 10 participants.…”

“…KONTAKT®, PEERS®, SOSTA-FRA, and START, incorporated individually tailored homework assignments to support the generalisation of learnt skills to everyday contexts. Uniquely, the long (Jonsson et al, 2018) and medium (Afsharnejad et al, 2021a(Afsharnejad et al, , 2021b variants of KONTAKT® incorporated components supporting the in-vivo assessment of learnt skills within the sessions (participants leading a session) and the generalisation of skills to a community context (an excursion to a café). In assessing the efficacy of SSGPs programs, four studies employed active control groups (Lerner & Mikami, 2012;Matthews et al, 2018Matthews et al, , 2020 or attempted to control for the effects of exposing autistic adolescents to a supportive social context (Afsharnejad et al, 2021a(Afsharnejad et al, , 2021b.…”

“…All 18 studies but one (Rabin et al, 2018) reported assessing PF, with studies employing various methods, including assessing video recordings of randomly chosen sessions using a fidelity checklist (Afsharnejad et al, 2021a(Afsharnejad et al, , 2021bChoque Olsson et al, 2017;Jonsson et al, 2018;White et al, 2013), observing a session assessing fidelity either in reference to the program manual (Shum et al, 2019;Yoo et al, 2014) or via a checklist. The included studies demonstrated overall PF scores ranging from 0.33 to 0.90 (M = 0.52, SD = 0.15), with 17% (k = 3) demonstrating a strong overall fidelity (Afsharnejad et al, 2021a(Afsharnejad et al, , 2021bChoque Olsson et al, 2017;Jonsson et al, 2018). An overview of the PF scores is available via https:// osf.…”