Mixed Methods Approach to Describe Social Interaction During a Group Intervention for Adolescents With Autism Spectrum Disorders

Abstract

Over the last 20 years, researchers have been mixing qualitative and quantitative approaches, but mixed methods research represents a new movement that arose in response to the currents of qualitative and quantitative research, considered separately. Little has been published on the use of polar coordinate analysis in psychotherapy. This type of analysis can provide detailed information and integrate the qualitative-quantitative analysis. Even less has been published on the analysis of ASD children’s behavior. The main aim of this study was to implement this mixed methods methodology to analyze patterns of social behaviors in a group of adolescents with ASD during a group social competence intervention program. Moreover, we wanted to see whether an observational scale could be combined fruitfully with polar coordinate analysis and to investigate whether typical ASD behaviors show similar interrelations (prospective and retrospective sequentialities) as behaviors observed in psychotherapy. We used an adaptation from the Social Skills Training Program (UC Davis, California). We observed that each participant took a unique course, increasing or decreasing the number and quality of their social behaviors. In accordance with previous literature, results suggest some increment in the amount of appropriate social conduct. We did not detect a generalized progress pattern but agreed that there were changes between the beginning and end of the intervention. Therefore, we consider that observational methodology is useful in the field of psychotherapy and ASD, offering detailed information about changes and development that cannot be obtained with other traditional measures, such as questionnaires.

Improvement of Planning Skills in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder After an Educational Intervention: A Study From a Mixed Methods Approach

“…In short, the mixed methods approach adopted has shown its enormous potential to help us to study the improvement of the planning skills of children with ASD, and consequently, to improve their quality of life; aspect that proves to be particularly deficient in children and adolescents with ASD compared to their typically developing peers (de Vries and Geurts, 2015). Therefore, and in accordance with other authors (Arias-Pujol et al, 2015;Rodríguez-Medina et al, 2016Alcover et al, 2019), we advocate the use of mixed methods approach. The use of the mixed methods approach (and, more exactly, the observational methodology considered in itself as mixed methods), due it offers rigor and flexibility, is still more necessary and useful when it comes to the assessment of participants of a young age and special characteristics, as is the case of this study (Anguera, 2003).…”

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

“…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.…”

A Mixed Methods Framework for Psychoanalytic Group Therapy: From Qualitative Records to a Quantitative Approach Using T-Pattern, Lag Sequential, and Polar Coordinate Analyses

“…Like T-pattern detection, polar coordinate analysis has been used in a wide range of fields, including clinical psychology ( Arias-Pujol and Anguera, 2017 ; Rodríguez-Medina et al, 2018 ; Alcover et al, 2019 ; Del Giacco et al, 2020 ).…”

“…While most studies have been conducted in adults, some have been conducted in adolescents ( Down et al, 2011 ) and children with emotional and behavioral problems in groups ( Swank and Shin, 2015 ) and individual psychodynamic play therapy ( Halfon et al, 2016 ). Our group has used observational methodology to analyze group psychotherapy in previous studies ( Vaimberg, 2010 ; Roustan et al, 2013 ; Arias-Pujol and Anguera, 2017 ; Alcover et al, 2019 ) and in the empirical part of this article. In the latter we demonstrate the different steps involved in the QUAL-QUAN-QUAL transformation of data and show how the “connecting” method ( Creswell and Plano Clark, 2017 ) is an ideal way to link qualitative and quantitative elements within a systematic observation framework.…”