An Investigation of Changes in Social-Pragmatic Communication Following Participation in the PEERS Program

• Author / Creator

  Bild, Oliver

• Abstract
  Background: The Program for the Educational Enrichment of Relational Skills (PEERS) is a manualized social skills program designed to help teenagers diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder make and maintain friendships. To date, outcomes of PEERS have primarily related to social skills knowledge and frequency of teen get-togethers, assessed by caregiver, parent and teacher report. No studies have looked in-depth at changes in social-pragmatic communication experienced by participants of PEERS. There has also been a lack of direct observational methods used to assess gains documented from participation in PEERS.

  Objective: The purpose of this research was to obtain preliminary data, using measures that include direct observation, of changes in adolescents’ social-pragmatic communication, following completion of the PEERS program.

  Method: We conducted a multiple case series study with three participants. Raters, blinded to the pre- and post-PEERS intervention condition, rated social-pragmatic communication behaviours for each participant from video taken based on the Yale in vivo Pragmatic Protocol (YiPP; Simmons, Paul and Volkmar, 2014), a semi-structured conversational interview. A portion of each video was also rated based on the Pragmatic Rating Scale (PRS; Landa et al., 1992), a coding schema used to assess social-pragmatic communication. Parents rated their teen’s communication pre- and post-PEERS using the Children’s Communication Checklist – Second Edition (CCC-2; Bishop, 2003). Parents also participated in a semi-structured interview about their subjective impressions of the changes experienced by their children after taking part in PEERS.

  Results: Findings illustrated potentially meaningful changes on the YiPP in the domain of Discourse Management as well as on the PRS in the category of Pragmatic Behaviours, further concentrated in the subcategory of Exchange of Information. Participants improved on the Interests subscale of the CCC-2 and an indicator of potential positive change was observed for Initiation. All parents subjectively rated that their teen’s communication ability had improved. A theme of increased social awareness, sensitivity and understanding of others emerged from the analysis of the semi-structured parent interview.

  Discussion: Results suggest meaningful and observable social-pragmatic communication changes occurred after the teens had participated in PEERS. Future larger scale research on social-pragmatic changes is warranted, with a focus on conversational back-and-forth. Methodological challenges and considerations for future work are considered.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • autism spectrum disorder
  • PEERS
  • adolescents
  • social communication
  • pragmatic language

• Graduation date

  Fall 2018

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Master of Science

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R3PK07H9W

• License

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