Self-regulation and social interaction skills among children with autism across time

In the current study, the purpose of this paper is to examine the self-regulation and social interaction skills of children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) as compared to children with intellectual disabilities (IDs) across time.

Drawn from the Special Education Elementary Longitudinal Study (SEELS), our sample consisted of 1,016 children diagnosed with ASD and 597 children diagnosed with ID. The self-regulation and social interaction skills were measured using relevant subscales of the Scales of Independent Behavior-Revised across three time points evenly spaced at two years apart.

Results revealed that children with ASD have significantly worse self-regulation (p<0.01, η2=0.12, Cohen's f=0.36) and social interaction skills (p<0.01, η2=0.05, Cohen's f=0.21) as compared to children with ID across time. The results of the current study support the results of Bieberich and Morgan (2004) that children with ASD have significantly worse self-regulation and social interaction skills as compared to children with ID across time.

The paper suggests that our results may be considered as more generalizable given the utilization of data from the SEELS as a large, nationally representative, and community-based sample of children with disabilities across the USA examined longitudinally.