Family delivered scoial stories on teaching social skills to youth with autism spectrum disorders

The present study was designed to investigate the effects of Parent Education Program on teaching family members who have children with autism spectrum disorders to develop and implement social stories. The effects of social stories delivered by family members on teaching social skills to youth with autism were also investigated. Moreover, maintenance and generalization effects of social stories were tested. Last but not least, social validity of the study was examined through subjective evaluation and social comparison.Three youths with autism whose ages are 12 to 16 years old and their mothers and older sister participated in this study. Small group arrangement was designed to teach family members how to develop and implement social stories to their children with using parent manual, modeling, practicing, and feedback sequence. Learning to develop social stories and implement it reliably took 6 hours.Mixed design was used in the study including single subject research and descriptive design. The effects of social stories on teaching social skills to youths with autism was investigated by using multiple probe design with probe conditions across parent-youth dyads. Social validity of the study was examined by using descriptive design.Findings of the study showed that family members learned to write social stories with 100% accuracy and delivered social stories to their children with high reliability. Also, it is seen that family members were able to maintain the acquired skills and generalized it to the novel situations. The results of the study showed that youths with autism were able to acquire their target skills, and maintain and generalized the acquired target skills. Social validity findings of the study were positive. Family members reported their opinions about the social validity of the study positively and social comparison results showed that after the intervention the performance of the youth autism spectrum disorders were same as their peers with normal development on targeted social skills.Further research are needed to support these findings and parents, teachers and other experts should widely use social stories on teaching social skills.