A Pilot Randomized Controlled Trial of Motivation-Based Social Skills Group Treatment with Parent Training
A short, inclusive play group plus quick parent coaching lifts peer initiations for preschoolers with autism, especially the ones who seldom seek kids out.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Researchers tested a 12-week program called SUCCESS. It mixes an inclusive play group with parent training.
Kids with autism joined typical peers for naturalistic play. Parents learned to prompt and praise social tries at home.
The team ran a small randomized trial. They compared SUCCESS to usual preschool services.
What they found
Children in SUCCESS made more unprompted and prompted peer initiations. Clinicians also saw bigger social gains.
Parent surveys stayed flat except for one group. Kids who started with low social motivation showed parent-noticed gains too.
How this fits with other research
Watkins et al. (2019) got the same lift in initiations using one child’s special interests. SUCCESS shows a group-plus-parent version works without tailoring toys to each kid.
Capio et al. (2013) spent twelve months coaching parents only. SUCCESS keeps the parent piece but hits similar social goals in just twelve weeks by adding peer practice.
Older peer-tutor studies like Mueller et al. (2000) doubled social bids after training classmates. SUCCESS proves adult-led naturalistic teaching in a mixed group can match those gains without turning peers into tutors.
Why it matters
You can run SUCCESS in any inclusive preschool room. One staff member leads play while you coach parents at pickup. Start with kids who rarely approach peers; they show the fastest pay-off. Track unprompted initiations during free play; you should see a jump by week four.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Despite the popularity of social skills groups, there remains a need for empirical investigation of treatment effects, especially when targeting pivotal aspects of social functioning such as initiations to peers. The goal of the present study was to conduct a randomized controlled trial of a 12-week social intervention (SUCCESS), which combined an inclusive social group with a parent education program. Twenty-five 4- to 6-year-olds with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) were randomized to SUCCESS (N = 11) or to treatment as usual (N = 14). Combining a peer group model with a parent training program, the SUCCESS intervention used naturalistic behavioral techniques (e.g., environmental arrangement, natural reinforcement) to increase social initiations to peers. After 12 weeks, children participating in the SUCCESS program made more frequent initiations to peers than children in the treatment-as-usual group, including more prompted and unprompted initiations to request. Additional gains in clinician-rated social functioning were observed in children randomized to SUCCESS, while differential treatment effects were not detected in parent-rated measures. However, lower baseline social motivation was associated with greater parent-reported initiation improvement. This study provides preliminary support for the efficacy of a naturalistic, behavioral social skills intervention to improve peer initiations for children with ASD. The findings suggest that using a motivation-based social skills group was effective in increasing both prompted and spontaneous initiations to peers, and highlights the need for further research into the role of baseline social motivation in predicting social skills treatment response.
Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 2025 · doi:10.1007/s10803-024-06302-9