CBT Social Skills Intervention for School Aged Boys with ASD

Background: School-aged children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) experience significant difficulty with peer interaction, an important occupation of childhood. Unresolved social skills difficulties lead to continued dysfunction in relationships which influence long term success. Research into the most effective strategies has increased but several questions remain. One approach that appears to help school-aged children is Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) which focuses on changing how a person thinks about specific social situations as well as how they behave (Bauminger, 2006 a, b).  

Objectives: This study investigated whether group social skills intervention based on CBT significantly improved the social skills of school-aged boys with ASD.  

Methods: Ten boys aged 10-12 who met criteria for ASD based on expert clinical opinion using DSM IV criteria and confirmed by administering the ADOS (Lord, Rutter, Dilavore & Risi, 1999) were participants. Participants also met inclusion criteria of full scale IQ and receptive language greater than 80. They were randomly assigned to treatment versus waitlist control group. Intervention was delivered in fifteen weekly 1.5 hour sessions, first to the treatment group and then to the waitlist control group, using a curriculum (Baker, 2003; Garcia-Winner, 2005) based on the principles of CBT. Three of the fifteen sessions were intended to focus entirely on practicing skills in fun activities without specific social skills instruction. The other sessions included topics such as learning to read nonverbal cues, understanding another person's perspective, starting and maintaining conversations, dealing with difficult social situations and general social problem-solving. Group size varied from four to six participants. Pre and post intervention scores were collected in the domains of peer interaction, social perception, pragmatic language, social responsiveness, general adaptive behavior in the area of socialization and general social knowledge.   

Results: This poster describes the intervention program and specific changes in selected social skills and social knowledge for participants in the CBT group intervention program using repeated measures t-tests. Comparison of the intervention and waitlist control group will also be reported. Responsiveness of measurement tools will be presented.  

Conclusions: CBT holds promise for high functioning children with ASD. This pilot research provides direction for therapists considering using group-based CBT to improve social interactions.