Promoting social play skills in children with autism using video modeling

Background: Peer relations serve many important functions in children’s development. In autism, however, reciprocity of social exchange is missing and this has a devastating effect on the skill of relating. Recently video modeling has been regarded as an effective procedure that may offer some help.

Objectives: The overall aim of this presentation is to demonstrate scientific evidence for video modeling as a valuable technique for promoting social play skills in children with autism. Critical components of this procedure will be highlighted through a brief exploration of three experimental studies. Some data from these studies have already been published in peer-reviewed journals and a book.

Methods: In total, 13 children with autism participated and experimental control was demonstrated using either a multiple-baseline across subjects or a multiple-treatment designs. Study 1 investigated the general notion of promoting social play skills in children with autism. Study 2 assessed the effectiveness of video modeling in establishing generalized responding of these target behaviors. Study 3 examined how many sequences of behavior could be included in individual video clips in terms that effective activity schedules would be constructed using video clips instead of booklets of pictures. Particular aspects of the intervention were systematically analyzed in each study to determine the effective components of video modeling, independently of the behavioral characteristics of the children and in the absence of any experimenter-implemented prompts.

Results: Collectively, results revealed that video modeling can enhance social play skills; establish generalized responding; and build a sequence of social play behaviors. Data also showed that all competing behaviors like disruptive or self-stimulatory reduced substantially as soon as social play skills occurred; behavior gains generalized across stimuli, settings, and peers and maintained after 1-, 2-, or 3-month follow-up periods.

Conclusions: Video modeling can become a time-efficient and powerful educational tool for individuals with autism.