Social stories delivered by siblings: An intervention example of coaching

The present study was designed to investigate the effects of coaching program on teaching siblings of children with autism to develop and implement social stories. The effects of social stories delivered by siblings with normal development (ND) on teaching social skills ("Can I help you?) to children with autism were also investigated. Besides, maintenance and generalization effects of social stories were tested. And also, social validity of the study was examined through subjective evaluation completed by the siblings' mothers and siblings with ND. The present study includes three children with autism whose ages are 6 to 7 years who continues to have training in Developmental Support Unit at Anadolu University and their siblings with ND. Individual teaching sessions were designed to teach siblings with ND about what social story is and how to implement social stories to to teach their siblings with autism. Description, modeling, practice, feedback, and planning sequence was used to teach the use of social stories. It took one hour to teach social stories to the siblings with ND. The effects of social stories on teaching social skill called "Can I help you?" to siblings with autism was investigated by using multiple probe design with probe conditions across participants. Social validity of the study was examined through descriptive analysis. Findings of the study showed that siblings with ND learned to implement social stories reliably (ranges from 82% to 99%) through coaching when teaching their siblings with autism. Besides, it is obtained that siblings with ND were able to maintain the acquired skills and generalize it to the novel situations with teaching their siblings with the same social story. The results of the study also showed siblings with autism were able to acquire, maintain and generalize their target skills. Social validity of the study were positive in general. Further studies are needed to support these findings and parents, siblings, teachers, psychologists, and the other specialists should wisely use social stories on teaching social skills. Keywords: Social stories, Coaching, Sibling coaching, Parent teaching, Sibling Teaching, Single-subject research, Teaching social skill.