Social Narratives

Example goal:

By next year the student will independently follow social rules such as greeting, saying thank you etc. when interacting with adults and peers in the classroom setting as observed by the SLP across 3 days.

Social Narrative

Social narratives are used to teach a child about expectations of behavior in a particular scenario (Lofland, 2015). Social stories should be prepared by the clinician before the target event happens and be reviewed with the child to prepare them for the event and set expectations (Lofland, 2015).

For this activity, I will be focusing on how to make a personalized social story and use it in a session. There are many sources for social stories on the internet, however, when selecting a social story it is important to make sure it has all the necessary elements of a social story and that you know how to use the story properly.

What should a social story have?

Personalized social stories have been found to be more effective than general social stories (Edwards et al., 2021). In order to make a personalized social story you may need to collect pictures that will be relevant to the situation and unique to the child this may include

Photos of the child
Photos of the environment that the situation will take place in
Photos of expected communication partners such as friends and teachers (Edwards et al., 2021).

Before writing the social story the clinician should gather baseline data on the target behavior (Lofland, 2015). Due to the vast amounts of behaviors that could be targeted by a social narrative, there are many different ways to collect data that may be appropriate. Generally when the social narrative is targeting a behavior that we are either trying to encourage or eliminate a simple +/- system

When writing the story we use 3 types of sentences (Edwards et al., 2021)

Descriptive -Sentences that set the scene and describe what is happening eg. " My teacher begins singing the clean up song"

Directive- Sentences describing what actions the child should take eg. " I will pick up my toys and sit at my desk."

Perspective- Theses sentences explain how others will receive the action and how it will make them feel eg. " My teacher will be proud of me and my friends will be happy I helped them."

In order to make the story not just feel like a list of tasks to do it is important to use all 3 types of sentences. Research has also shown that children with ASD interprete inflexible terms literally so using flexible terms like may or might when the result is not absolute can be helpful (Edwards et al., 2021).

How do I use a social story in practice?

Implementation of the social narrative should ideally happen before the situation the narrative describes (Lofland, 2015). The clinician should read the social narrative with the child pointing out visual cues and important concepts (Lofland, 2015). The clinician may also model the behavior. Some evidence suggests that role playing may be another step to implementing the social narrative and personalizing it (Edwards et al., 2021). For more instruction on role playing for those with social pragmatic deficits read about that activity here. Some students might not need these additional cues and may be successful with only the story being read to them. Every child is different and it is up to the the SLPs clinical judgment how often the social story should be read and if any modeling or role playing is necessary.

References

Lofland, K. (2015). Writing and using social narratives in all environments. The Reporter, 20 (9). Retrieved from https://www.iidc.indiana.edu/pages/writing-and-using-social-narratives

This article gives a step by step guide to creating a social narrative.

Edwards, K. A. M., McKenney, E. L. W., Niekra, N., Hupp, S. D. A., & Everett, G. E. (2021). Personalization of social narratives for students with autism spectrum disorder: Brief experimental analysis. Research in Autism Spectrum Disorders, 89, 101877. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rasd.2021.101877

This is a study showing how effective the use of a personalized social narrative was for a small group of children with social pragmatics deficits.

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