A framework to evaluate technology-based support for Social Story interventions

Background and objectives: Social Story interventions are widely used to address social and behavioural issues in children with autism. Recently, technology-based applications developed specifically for Social Stories are... [ view full abstract ]

Background and objectives: Social Story interventions are widely used to address social and behavioural issues in children with autism. Recently, technology-based applications developed specifically for Social Stories are being marketted to the autism community with increasing popularity. This is in addition to a number of other educational (e.g. Boardmaker) and general (e.g. Powerpoint) applications that are used in supporting Social Story interventions. However, currently there is not a systematic review to classify and evaluate these applications. This paper proposes a framework for evaluating the applications for supporting Social Story interventions and applies the framework to existing commercial applications used for Social Story interventions.
Methodology: The evaluation framework was created, based on existing literature and a survey with 103 practitioners and 36 parents. The commercial applications for Social Stories were then identified through a rigorous search on the most popular apps stores, as well as through the survey. These applications were evaluated by two researchers applying the proposed framework.
Results: Forty-six applications were identified and grouped into three categories: 1) 17 applications explicitly developed to support Social Stories; 2) 22 educational applications applied to Social Stories; 3) 7 general applications applied to Social Stories. The application of the framework revealed that all the applications meet less than 50% of the evaluation criteria.
Conclusions & Perspectives: Existing applications do not meet the proposed criteria to effectively support Social Story interventions for the autism community. A set of guidelines to inform future development of Social Story applications is proposed.

Conflict of interest: The authors have no conflict of interest to disclose This submission could form part of a discussion panel on technology and ASD [ view full abstract ]

Conflict of interest: The authors have no conflict of interest to disclose
This submission could form part of a discussion panel on technology and ASD