Review of the roles of materials, permissiveness, and structure in play-based social interventions for autistic youth

ABSTRACT

For youth on the autism spectrum, play offers rich opportunities for the development of social competence. Play-based activities are well suited for social skills interventions because the structure of the game play can easily incorporate the youths’ interests and can be designed to mimic social rules. Despite the wealth of literature on the topic of play-based learning, it is not clear how play factors such as play materials (toys, objects, imaginative spaces), permissiveness (player autonomy), and structure (role-based play, interaction rules) contribute to skill development. This paper reviews the literature on play-based social interventions and will compare three play-based approaches based on materials, permissiveness, and structure: (a) LEGO-therapy, (b) virtual environment social program, and (c) therapeutically applied role-playing games. Implications of the results for practitioners and researchers are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Play-based learning
• interventions
• autism spectrum disorder
• social competence

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 To reflect the diversity of preferences in terms of descriptors, this paper uses both person-first (person with autism) and identity-first (autistic person) language (Vivanti, 2020).

2 Autistic people have been described as having difficulty reading the subtext of a social situation (Baron-Cohen et al., 1985) but this conception has been challenged on the basis that social contexts are co-constructed by those in the social situation and are not a priori objectively measured circumstances (e.g., ‘double empathy problem,’ Milton, 2012).