Social Interaction Research for People with Autism as a Set of Past, Current, and Emerging Propositions

Abstract

Social relationships are as important to people with autism as they are to any other member of society. However, a primary behavioral characteristic used to define the syndrome of autism is a paucity of social interaction. Such an observation about disordered behavior is really a proposition about a situation in need of remedy. A proposition is simply a statement about a problem to be solved, and the social interaction literature can be viewed as a concatenation of propositions. One of the first propositions tendered regarding autism was how to increase precursors to social interaction. The solution to that problem was to task analyze precursor behaviors and systematically structure their occurrence. Because of the success of these efforts, other previously untenable aspects of social interaction were targeted for analysis. As more and more social behaviors were proposed for analysis and studied, the notion of social skills emerged as a guiding theme. The concept of social skills itself occasioned an expansion of researchers’ propositions regarding what was relevant to social interaction. The answers to those questions have made the study of social interaction far more complex than was conceived originally. Emerging propositions in researchers’ work include questions about the nature of social competence, the development of friendships and other social relationships, and the ways in which various aggregates of behavior can assist us in understanding those broader goals. These more recent propositions are historical in context, but prescriptive in our pursuit of enriching the social participation of people with autism. If the past is any predictor of the future, social interaction research for people with autism is entering a period of fertile analysis and application.