Somewhere in the Middle: Understandings of Friendship and Approaches to Social Engagement among Postsecondary Students with Autism Spectrum Disorder
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This study examined the social experiences and understandings of friendship of postsecondary students with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Ten students from Ontario postsecondary institutions participated in semi-structured interviews and data were analyzed according to the principles of modified grounded theory. Participants’ responses indicate that they had conventional understandings of friendship that included compatible interests and aspects of intimacy. They expressed confidence about their strengths, personalities, and social abilities, and were motivated to develop and maintain friendships and participate in social activities with their peers. They also described experiencing communication challenges and difficulty engaging in various social environments. Participants positioned themselves as “somewhere in the middle” of peers with and without ASD in terms of social functioning, viewed supports as appropriate for others with ASD but not themselves, and employed strategic approaches to socializing in order to balance their desire for social connection with the impacts of the challenges that they experienced. They described areas of satisfaction and dissatisfaction or ambivalence with regard to their social lives. They expressed positive views about their friends, social activities, and ability to manage social situations, and described feelings of discomfort, concerns about making social errors, being evaluated negatively by others, the number of friends they had and how much time they spent with them. Participants’ descriptions revealed two pathways in terms of context selection, social engagement, and satisfaction that correspond with gender. Females prioritized maintaining contact with friends from before postsecondary and described higher levels of social engagement and satisfaction than males who emphasized socializing with peers from postsecondary. The relationship between context selection and level of social engagement on satisfaction was mediated by actively pursuing social goals and having a gradual approach to social development. The findings of this study have implications for research, advocacy, and support provision. These include the importance of accounting for differences among individuals with ASD in terms of their experiences, perspectives, skills, and goals, and the extent to which they identify with their diagnoses. Supports may also vary in relation to characteristics such as gender and cognitive abilities, and factors such as life stage and environmental contexts.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".