Assertive social skills training with autistic adults

An intrasubject multiple baseline design was used to assess the efficacy of assertiveness training with 4 autistic adults. Four assertive behaviors (asking for help, refusing requests, stating disagreements, and expressing complaints) were trained by employing written and oral instructions, modeling, role play, feedback, and social reinforcement. Subjects practiced verbal and nonverbal assertive behaviors to role play situations. Generalization was encouraged by including an overview of each assertive behavior, training with two trainers in several different locations, programming common stimuli across the training and generalization environments, and using written instructions. Two blind raters evaluated the subjects' videotaped responses to training and generalization role plays and verbatim responses to real life situations. The results demonstrate that the training package is an effective technique for teaching assertive skills to autistic adults. However, generalization to novel role plays was variable and generalization to real life situations did not occur.