Exploring How Social Communication Ability Is Affected by Disability, Context and Experience for Adolescents Transitioning to Adulthood.
Gerard H Poll, Samrawit Getachew, William J Boone and 1 others
Social communication ability is highly correlated across post-school contexts, so assessing in the setting most relevant to the student's plans is reasonable.
Prior experience boosted ability for post-secondary education (all) and independent living (those with disabilities), but job experience showed no effect.
Key findings
1Social communication ability measures were highly correlated across the four post-school contexts (r = 0.64 to 0.80), and mean item difficulty did not differ significantly by context (p = 0.31).
2After accounting for age and disability status, prior experience in a context was associated with higher social communication ability for that context for all participants in post-secondary education, and for participants reporting a disability in independent living, but job experience was not a significant predictor for employment.
3A reported disability was consistently associated with a lower measure of social communication ability across all three contexts examined.
Still to come
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for SLPs
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What it does not show
More female than male participants, a distribution not representative of transition-age adolescents. More participants were 18 to 21 than 14 to 17, the age at which many adolescents begin transition planning. Recruitment required video conferencing access, limiting the sample to those with appropriate technology. Five participants passed screening but later reported a history of emotional disturbance, which was an exclusion criterion. Experience was measured as a simple yes or no, so the degree or quality of experience in each context is unknown. The Transition Pragmatics Interview is a single measure of social communication ability; the authors note that multiple methods would give a more complete picture. Rasch analysis requires the data to be unidimensional, a constraint not present in all measurement models.
Declared interests
Funded by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIH) under award R15DC020521. The authors declare no conflicts of interest and note the content is solely their responsibility.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read the high cross-context correlations as meaning one assessment covers all settings. The correlations range from 0.64 to 0.80, not 1.0, and the authors themselves recommend focusing assessment on the context most relevant to the adolescent's plans. Also do not generalise the experience findings: prior job experience showed no association with employment-context social communication ability, so work experience alone should not be assumed to have built the relevant social skills.
Summarised by AI from the full paper, without a clinician reviewing it. Check it against the source before it changes what you do. Read it on PubMed →