Daily living skills of autistic adolescents and young adults: A scoping review.
Chelsea Auld, Kitty-Rose Foley, Andrew Cashin
PMID 35488176WHAT IT FOUND
Most research on daily living skills for autistic adolescents and young adults focuses on short-term gains in school settings.
This leaves therapists without evidence that skills generalise to home or community, or that they last beyond six months.
Key findings
01The majority of included studies were conducted in school settings with no follow-up assessment in other contexts, meaning skill generalisation to home or community remains unevidenced.
02Research on daily living skills is heavily skewed toward instrumental activities like money management, with only two studies focusing exclusively on basic self-care tasks.
03While technology-based teaching methods like video modelling are common, the review found that paper-based strategies produced largely similar results for skill acquisition.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for OTs
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What it does not show
The review did not assess the quality of the included studies, as is standard for scoping reviews, meaning the strength of evidence for any single finding is unverified. Definitions of 'adolescence' and 'young adulthood' vary across the literature, which may have led to inconsistent age ranges in the included studies. Participants in the primary studies often had co-occurring conditions like anxiety or ADHD, which may confound the specific impact of autism on daily living skills. The search was limited to English-language publications from 2011 to 2021, potentially excluding relevant international or older foundational research.
Declared interests
The authors declared no conflicts of interest.
The easy way to misread this
Do not interpret the reported improvements in daily living skills as evidence that patients will retain these abilities long-term or use them outside the clinic or school. The review found that most studies lacked data on skill generalisation and maintenance beyond three months, so apparent gains may not translate to real-world independence.