A Systematic Review of Studies on Social Skills Development for Adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorders

Abstract

Aim and Significance: The systematic literature review is developed as an investigation of existing and recommended evidence based social skills and strategies to adopt in improving adolescents with ASD social skills. The systematic review was developed based on the understanding that a majority of the studies have focused on children below 11 years social skills. The need to analsye and establish the age specific social skills and strategies required informed the review development. This ystematic review evaluates the available published studies on group-based social skills interventions in the United States and the realm of Canada to improve the social skills among adolescents with ASD Methods: The systematic review developed an online search for peer reviewed articles published on the Medline, PsycINFO, Psychoarticle, Psychology and behaviour and Web of Science, through a PubMed-NCBI, an EBSCO and the Ovid databases. Key words and phrases were used to search for relevant literature. Once results were obtained, an inclusion and exclusion criteria was applied to narrow down the studies to applicable and most relevant studies. Results and Discussion: Three categories of social skills interventions have been identified to be effective in improving social and communication skills. They are (i) the use of the PEERS, (ii) social skills training group and (iii) group skills training. The recommendation for future research should focus on comparing protocols of various social skills training in clinical settings of the real-world.