Social Behaviors of Children with ASD during Play with Siblings and Parents: Parental Perceptions

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Highlights

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    Development of the Sibling and Parent Play Interactions (SAPPI) instrument.

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    In some families, children with ASD were reported to engage in more withdrawal/agonism with older versus younger siblings.

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    Children with ASD were reported to engage in significantly more withdrawal/agonism in play with parents than with younger siblings.

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    Few reported differences in behaviors of children with ASD when playing with older siblings and parents.

Abstract

Background

Both siblings and parents are important interactional partners for children with ASD, but we know little about whether these interactions differ between these two groups, or between older and younger siblings.

Aims

To gather data about how parents perceive the interactional behaviors displayed by their child with ASD in play with their typically developing siblings and their parents.

Methods and procedures

Parents completed a questionnaire developed for this study about the behaviors their children with ASD demonstrated when interacting with a sibling or parent. Following factor analysis, a 29-item instrument with two factors was revealed. Factors were labelled Prosocial Interaction and Withdrawal/Agonism.

Outcomes and results

In some families, children with ASD were reported to display significantly higher levels of negative interaction when playing with their older siblings in comparison to younger siblings. When playing with their children with ASD, parents reported significantly more negative interactions compared to when their children with ASD played with younger siblings. There were few differences reported for play behaviors with parents versus older siblings.

Conclusions and implications

Children with ASD appear to display different interactional behaviors depending upon their play partners within the family unit. This study could be used to inform researchers of different interaction strategies which may be useful in creating interventions.

Section snippets

What this paper adds

There is little information about the ways in which children with ASD contribute to sibling interactions and whether their interactions differ depending upon whether their sibling is older or younger. In addition, differences in the interactional behaviors of children with ASD with respect to their siblings and parents is relatively unexplored. This study investigates these gaps in the literature. This paper presents a new tool, the Sibling and Parent Play Interactions (SAPPI), for collecting

Participants

Participants were the primary caregivers (95 % mothers) of 158 male and 26 female children aged between 2.92 and 13.0 years (M = 7.73 SD = 2.58) who had a diagnosis of ASD, confirmed by their parents. Ninety-seven percent of the children spoke only English at home. Sixty-nine percent of parents were married, 12.5 % were co-habiting with partners and 18.5 % were not married or in a co-habiting relationship. Family size varied: 8.7 % of children with ASD were only children, 56 % had one child age

Factor structure of the SAPPI

Working with polychoric correlations, we conducted a factor analysis using the method and syntax described in Lorenzo-Seva and Ferrando (2015). This uses a unified Bayes modal estimation with a weak prior, which usually leads to stable results with little bias (Choi, Kim, Chen, & Dannels, 2011). All other assumptions of factor analysis were met. The polychoric correlations for child-parent and sibling-sibling data sets yielded similar results. The initial analysis used the data reporting

Discussion

We aimed to gather data about how parents perceive the social interactions between their children with ASD and their typically developing children, as well as how the children with ASD interact with their parents. In order to address these questions we developed an instrument focussed on the behaviors of interest during play interactions. After factor analysis, two factors were retained for the SAPPI – these reflected prosocial behavior and withdrawn and agonistic behaviors.

The constellation of

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