Effectiveness of group therapy as social skills training for the children with autism

Abstract

Autism is one of the most common childhood neurological disorders. The children with autism have much more difficulty in developing everyday living skills. One of hallmarks of autism is lack of social interaction. Many therapy programs occupied within they have not been tested or examined to determine which is the most effective for children with autism; however, the evaluation of such programs are needed for evidence-based practice. This study is a response to the necessity for an increase of outcome-based research that analyzes the effectiveness of therapeutic group programs for children with autism as its main. Several objectives like identify the status of the social interaction skills of children with autism increase by group therapy as well as their relationship with socio-economical demography. Find out the association between the group therapy and social skill with structured and replicable protocol as appropriate interventions to improve children with autism’s status of social skills. This research study follows a quantitative design to evaluate the effectiveness of group therapy as social skills training for the children with autism. The preexperimental (pretest and posttest) design of quantitative research selected for this study. The researcher conducted the research study with a single group and provided group therapy as an intervention during the experiment without any control group and randomization. This study shows that the needs of social skills for the children with autism can be trained in therapeutic group settings sufficiently. This study discovers that group therapy very likely give the children with autism the use of group intervention well. This study also shows statistically demonstrable significant of the effectiveness of the group therapy intervention as improvements of all participant (n=28) in social play and emotional development, emotional regulation and communication skills.