Effects of PEERS® Social Skills Training on Young Adults with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities During College.
One semester of PEERS plus Circles lifted social knowledge, friendship quality, and real conversation skill for college students with IDD.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Ten college students with intellectual or developmental disabilities met every week for one semester. They took the PEERS social-skills class plus the Circles dating-boundary curriculum.
Before and after the class the students took tests on social rules, friendship quality, and two-minute chat samples. No control group was used.
What they found
After sixteen weeks the group knew more social rules and rated their friendships closer. Judges also heard longer, smoother conversations in the post-test chats.
Every student stayed in the program, so staff called it easy to run on campus.
How this fits with other research
Lao et al. (2024) ran the same PEERS lessons in Mandarin with autistic teens and saw the same gains in social knowledge. The pattern shows PEERS works across languages and ages.
Au-Yeung et al. (2015) and Shpigelman (2017) took a different path. They gave young adults with ID a simpler Facebook screen and safety rules, then also saw more social ties. Face-to-face PEERS and online tools may build the same social capital by different roads.
Lemons et al. (2015) surveyed college programs for students with ID and found money is still the top barrier. Good social-skills classes exist, but teams need stable funding to keep them running.
Why it matters
If you support college students with IDD, you now have a ready-made sixteen-week syllabus that fits a semester calendar and needs no extra lab gear. Pair PEERS with Circles to cover both friendship and dating boundaries. Track brief chat samples each month to show growth in real conversations.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The Program for the Education and Enrichment of Relational Skills (PEERS®) was used to provide weekly social skills training to a group of 10 college students with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) between ages 18 and 26 attending an inclusive residential postsecondary college program. Additionally, Circles curriculum was used to supplement the PEERS curriculum for teaching social relationship boundaries. An average of 12 sessions per semester of PEERS® training sessions were conducted over each academic year. The present study examines the impact of the program on social skills, friendship qualities, and conversational skills. Results showed increased social skill knowledge, friendship quality, and conversational skills from pretest to posttest intervention. In this paper, we discuss the training program, results, implications for practice, limitations, and future research needs.
Behavior modification, 2021 · doi:10.1177/0145445520987146