There were some limitations to this study. First, repetition between the ADOS-2 ‘Friends and Marriage’ section and some interview questions was inevitable, but this was managed by the researcher acknowledging earlier answers and asking for elaboration, rather than simply repeating the enquiry. It is also possible that some participants may have interpreted questions literally, a known feature of autistic understanding (Mitchell, Saltmarsh & Russell, 1997). For example, when asked “What is different about people you go to school with and your friends?”, one autistic boy initially responded by telling me about his journey to school, and so it was necessary to clarify that I was asking about classmates in general rather than just the people he travelled with. Nevertheless, as all testing was carried out by a single researcher, these issues were minimised by talking participants through any confusion, and through the early development of prompt questions in an attempt to predict any difficulties that might arise. Second, it was not possible to contact nominated best-friends to check reciprocity
or their views, as some previous work has (Calder, Hill, & Pellicano, 2013; Kasari, Locke, Gulsrud & Rotheram-Fuller, 2011), nor did I ask parents to rate their child’s friendships (for example, Bauminger & Shulman, 2003), which would have provided an additional perspective. While reciprocity information within social networks might have been useful to analyse, this would not have revealed much about subjects such as ‘network centrality’, which is how these data are normally used, as participants all came from different schools in different parts of the UK. Parental ratings of their child’s best-friendship would also have been interesting, but I was unable to find a validated measure to address this topic. In Chapter Five, however, I present data from the interviews with parents of the autistic girls in this study, in which parents discussed these issues in depth. I also feel that it is important that this study focused on young people’s views of their own friendship experiences – views that are much under-represented in research (Pellicano, Dinsmore & Charman, 2014) – as how they experience and value their friendships and peer interactions is what shapes their wider expectations, as in the work of Humphrey and Symes (2010).
2.8 Conclusion
This mixed-methods study develops a holistic understanding of how young autistic and neurotypical people perceive their friendships and conflict within them. The research showed that autistic adolescents have best-friendships they rate as like those of neurotypical adolescents, although autistic boys’ friendships are qualitatively different to those of autistic girls. I found that, in line with previous work, autistic adolescents are bullied more than their neurotypical peers – largely driven by the relational victimisation of autistic girls, who are very aware of ‘getting things wrong’ in their friendships. This conflict impacts on their wider relationships, but they have best-friendships which are like those of neurotypical girls, both in nature and degree. These findings challenge some assumptions in the literature that being autistic ‘overrides’ being female in some way, as evidenced by the use of majority-male
samples to derive results that are applied to both genders (Bauminger et al., 2008; Bauminger and Kasari, 2000; Rowley et al., 2012).
This study clearly shows that autistic boys and girls have very different social experiences, and adds to a growing body of work supporting the idea that autistic girls (and possibly women) need different support in understanding and navigating the social expectations placed upon them. The findings suggest that parents and professionals should be aware that females may challenge the stereotypical views that autistic people struggle to make and maintain close relationships. Autistic people, especially autistic girls, clearly do form these friendships, and the presence of these should not be taken as an indication that they are therefore ‘not autistic’ or not impacted by their condition.
In this Chapter, I presented data that addressed key questions regarding the nature of autistic adolescents’ friendships and conflict experiences, and whether these experiences differed by gender and diagnosis. Critically, some of the answers to these questions were revealed through the interviews of the autistic adolescents themselves – an unfortunate rarity in the extant literature. The differences in friendships and conflict experiences identified, not just between girls and boys but also within each gender group, in this Chapter, progressed my thinking to considering which factors might contribute to these experiences, and this is what I will present in Chapter Three. I wanted to examine which factors might contribute to these experiences, following the themes identified in Chapter One, and which were present in the interviews with adolescents. For example, the difficulties with reading others described by autistic girls echoes the idea that social awareness skills may play a role in friendships and conflict experiences; the social anxiety (and following friendship insecurity) discussed by autistic (and neurotypical) girls directly mirrors research on anxiety and friendships in neurotypical individuals; and the challenges of inhibiting the desire to keep pushing a joke seen
in boys (which speaks to self-regulation skills), all suggest that these areas are worth investigating.
Chapter Three: Examining gender differences in the key predictors of friendship and conflict experiences
As important as it is to know that autistic girls and boys are facing different social experiences and challenges, that they rate their friendships differently, and that they are bullied at different rates and in different ways as shown in Chapter Two, it is also important to understand what might contribute to these friendship and conflict involvement outcomes. This knowledge may in the future help to develop support programmes and interventions which target areas for support to help autistic adolescents, particularly autistic girls, to make and maintain positive friendships and either avoid or successfully manage social conflict with their peers.
In this Chapter, three key potential contributing factors were identified from the existing literature and investigated – social awareness, self-regulation, and anxiety. These variables were entered into a linear regression model to attempt to determine which individual features could help to anticipate positive social outcomes and which could be targeted for support to improve outcomes. Friendship Strength (on the FQS) was selected as one of the outcome variables to model, as Friendship Strength covers the quality of adolescents’ best-friendship, which is their most important peer relationship. Victimisation (on the RPEQ) was selected as this reflects the level of aggression which adolescents are subjected to by their peers, which the literature discussed in Chapter One has shown to have significant impacts on quality of life and educational and adult outcomes. Following the gender differences seen in Chapter Two – that girls have stronger friendships than boys regardless of diagnostic status, and that girls experience relational conflict at much higher rates than boys experience overt conflict – I decided to develop separate models for girls and boys. In boys, the interaction between autism
and anxiety was the only significant predictor of Victimisation, but in girls, anxiety and social awareness were the significant predictors.
In Chapter Two, the adolescent interviews showed that there were a range of factors that could contribute to their friendship and conflict experiences. Following the literature described in Chapter One, autistic participants described having difficulties with understanding what their neurotypical peers meant or intended towards them (social awareness difficulties), some challenges with knowing when to stop or losing their temper with peers (self-regulation), and worrying about whether their friendships were genuine and whether they were “getting things wrong” (anxiety). Existing literature has shown that challenges in all these areas can contribute to difficulties with social relationships or with being bullied, in both autistic and neurotypical young people. For example, Crawford and Manassis showed that those with poorer social skills had less strong friendships (2011), and difficulties with social interactions are part of the diagnostic criteria for autism (APA, 2000; 2013). Similarly, adolescents who struggled to control their emotional outbursts towards their peers were less likely to be chosen as work or play partners (Melnick & Hinshaw, 2000). Finally, there has been a wealth of work on the role of social anxiety in creating less strong and less supportive friendships (La Greca & Lopez, 1998; Vernberg et al., 1992), and work showing that social anxiety is significantly elevated in autistic individuals (Kim, 2000; White et al., 2009), and it may be that this anxiety impacts on the friendships and bullying experiences of autistic adolescents.