Exploring How Social Communication Ability Is Affected by Disability, Context and Experience for Adolescents Transitioning to Adulthood

BACKGROUND: Effective social communication is adapted to the context, the setting and the people involved. It is less clear how measures of adolescent social communication ability reflect these aspects of context. Social communication ability emerges from children's early experiences in varied contexts. Evidence is mixed on whether prior experience in the workplace, post-secondary education or independent living, is associated with social communication ability for those settings. AIMS: The purpose of the study was to empirically evaluate the associations between measures of adolescents' social communication ability, the context of assessment, and the examinee's prior experience in the context. METHODS AND PROCEDURES: One-hundred fifty 14-21-year-old adolescents, 59 with developmental disabilities, participated in a cross-sectional study. Researchers administered instruments to measure social communication for four post-school settings. They also collected reports of prior experience in those settings. Rasch analysis was used to derive both item difficulty and social communication ability measures. Researchers evaluated the association between experience in a context and social communication ability for that context using regression models. OUTCOMES AND RESULTS: Social communication measures were highly correlated across contexts. Social communication ability was associated with experience in post-secondary education, as was experience living independently for participants reporting disabilities. CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS: The results support conceiving of social communication as the ability to adapt one's communication to a context, an ability that is not bound to any one context. The varied findings on the association between prior experience in a context and social communication in that context can be interpreted as reflecting how difficult it is to learn the cues of that setting and generalize that learning to new situations, leading to potential differences in the amount and quality of experience required to successfully communicate in a context. WHAT THIS PAPER ADDS: What is already known on this subject For adolescents with communication disorders, developing social communication skills is important to their outcomes in adulthood. According to developmental models, social communication emerges from children's experiences in varied contexts. Different contexts elicit different language, but child measures of social communication ability from different contexts are correlated. What this study adds to existing knowledge Adolescent social communication ability measures for four post-school contexts were highly correlated. Experience in the post-secondary education context was associated with greater social communication ability for all adolescents, but only adolescents with developmental disabilities benefited from independent living experience. What are the potential or actual clinical implications of this work? Assessments of social communication across multiple contexts are likely to be correlated; the choice of contexts for assessment may be motivated by the student's goals and interests. The findings support offering programs designed to build adolescent social communication skills by providing experiences in independent living or post-secondary education.