Measuring Changes in Social Skills Throughout an Intervention Program for Children with ASD, Contributions from Polar Coordinate Analysis

Abstract

The demand of social skills interventions for people with ASD has grown in recent years. The main goal of this research was to study social skills: “responding to interaction” and “initiating interaction”, and to capture whether there were differences between an initial and a final session in a program for children with ASD. Additionally, we aimed to compare social skills patterns according to the VIQ level. The sample (N = 20) was divided into 2 subgroups depending on whether the VIQ was > 90 or < 90. We employed a mixed methods approach based on a systematic observation of social behaviors. The observational design was nomothetic, follow-up, and multidimensional. Once we confirmed inter-observer reliability for the ad hoc observational instrument we performed descriptive statistics and polar coordinate analysis using LINCE software. The results show high intragroup and intergroup variability. In general, participants with VIQ < 90 showed a better improvement in responding to interaction, whereas participants with VIQ > 90 showed more complex patterns to initiate interactions. The polar coordinate technique was useful for detecting significant relationships between autism’s social micro-behaviors. Results and information obtained through observational methodology could allow professionals to understand communication and interaction of participants.

Evaluating in the Real-World Educational Intervention to Improve Interference Control in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder

“…In this line, the intellectual functioning of each group could condition the implementation of the intervention. The intervention required different support for each group depending on their level of functioning [ 76 ]. These results are in line with the literature, which indicates that those with the poorest executive functions consistently gain the most from any program that improves these functions [ 92 ].…”

“…In future studies, the complementary use of other analysis techniques, such as a “Markov analysis” [ 30 , 88 ], “polar coordinate analysis” [ 30 , 32 , 75 , 76 , 108 ], or a “temporal pattern (T-patterns) detection” [ 109 ], would offer greater information about interference control in ASD children.…”

“…Afterwards, 46 sessions were randomly selected to calculate reliability. This number of sessions was determined taking into account that the percentage of sessions mostly used by recent observational research to calculate the reliability ranges from 10 to 20% [ 75 , 76 , 77 , 78 , 79 , 80 ]. The sessions were chosen at random but taking into account that all the participants and all the tasks were reflected.…”