Quantifying the social competence of those with autism
Those with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) show a huge range of challenges and abilities. To address these issues, recent SFU alumna Jodi Yager focused on the social aspect of ASD for her PhD work in SFU’s Clinical Psychology Program, creating a new tool that may allow parents and caregivers to better understand the complex sociality of those with ASD.
“There is a huge range in terms of level of functioning,” explained Yager. “There are still a lot of people who are on the lower end, who have difficulty with language, and kind of basic everyday adaptive skills, but then we also have this higher functioning end of the spectrum where the individuals are actually very bright, very verbal, and it’s really just the social area that’s very challenging for them.”
Yager saw a lack of tools to capture the variability that can be seen across individuals with ASD. Working with Dr. Grace Iarocci, Yager developed the Multidimensional Social Competence Scale, with the hope of capturing the wide range of social abilities she had witnessed.
“What we did is develop a questionnaire, sort of a parent scale that looks at the variability in terms of profiles of social strengths and weaknesses,” said Yager. “It looked at functioning across seven specific areas of social competence, and the hope is that we can use this sort of measure to quantify more of a social profile for individuals.”
The seven areas identified by Yager are social motivation, social inferencing, demonstrating empathic concern, social knowledge, verbal conversation skills, nonverbal sending skills, and emotion regulation. When the scale was administered to 181 parents across Canada, Yager found that the seven distinct areas identified came through, and informed the overall score.
Yager said, “We’re basically finding that kids who had higher scores on our measures had more strengths in term of social competence, and that also seemed to translate into them being a little bit more successful in the day-to-day social world. They had a few more friends, they had more regular social contact, and a little bit more accepted by peers. So that just sort of tells us that the scale has some real life validity as well.
“It was a long journey, but in the end, I was happy with how it all ended up.”
