Exploring the social responsiveness of children who have autism or are socially withdrawn

Abstract

This study is based on children who are diagnosed with autism and others who are socially withdrawn. Another small group of children with no social impairment was considered, and acted as a control group. The foundations for this study were literature on autism and social withdrawal, even though information from this area was lacking on a Maltese perspective. Schools were selected at random and teachers filled in the Social Responsiveness Scale (Constantino et al., 2005) on one student from each class. This was done for children between 9 and 11 years of age. Results from the questionnaire were inputted in SPSS Statistics 17.0 and graphical and tabular representations of results were obtained using the One-Way ANOVA and Post-hoc Tukey. On interpreting the results, it was found that female children show higher traits of social communication and autistic mannerisms then males. There was a significant difference in autistic mannerisms between children aged 9 and 10. Finally, children who are socially withdrawn show a significant difference when compared to children with autism in all domains of the Social Responsiveness Scale with the exception of Social Communication.