Component analysis of the effects of social stories on social pragmatic skills for individuals with autism spectrum disorder

Document Type

Thesis

College

College of Arts and Sciences

Department

Psychology

Degree

M.S. Applied Behavior Analysis

Date Completed

2019

First Committee Member

MacDonald, Rebecca

Second Committee Member

Thompson, Rachel

Third Committee Member

Dickson, Chata

Abstract

"The purpose of the current study was to identify the effective components (text, pictures, conversation bubbles or comprehension questions) involved in a Social Story through a component analysis. The target skills taught were social pragmatic skills in the context of a conversation, specifically responding to a speaker’s happy or distressed emotional state. A multiple baseline across topics was used to assess generalization within participants. Participants were trained using two types of Social Stories: basic and enhanced. Participants were first trained using the basic Social Story and moved to the enhanced Social Story if they failed to meet mastery criterion using the first Social Story. Following mastery of the first topic of conversation the participants’ responses to the untrained topics of conversation were probed for generalization. Results showed that the use of the enhanced Social Story was effective in teaching one participant to respond empathetically to the speaker’s emotional state across three topics of conversation. For the second participant the combination of the enhanced Social Story with written prompts was effective in teaching responding to the speaker’s emotional state across three topics of conversation."

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