Understanding Neurodiverse Social Play Between Autistic and Non-Autistic Children

2024. Brooke Morris, Hayati Havlucu, Alison Oldfield & Oussama Metatla
Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

Abstract

Social play supports children to develop essential life skills and foster friendships. However, autistic and non-autistic children often do not have equal opportunities to engage in social play. Previous research to improve these opportunities tends to invoke social skill interventions solely for autistic children or is focused on designing for only one group, rather than considering the interactions or needs of all children in neurodiverse groups1. In order to understand the different experiences of children during social play, we conducted interviews with 6 professionals who support neurodiverse social play and undertook observation sessions of 36 autistic and non-autistic children during unstructured social play. Our findings move beyond the existing characterizations of autistic social play and build upon the double empathy problem to capture and consider the needs of all children in neurodiverse playgroups. We argue these findings could be used to inform future neurodiverse social play technology design in HCI.

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Citation

Morris, B., Havlucu, H., Oldfield, A., & Metatla, O. (2024). Understanding neurodiverse social play between autistic and non-autistic children. Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. URL: https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642809, doi:10.1145/3613904.3642809

BibTeX

@inproceedings{10.1145/3613904.3642809,
author = {Morris, Brooke and Havlucu, Hayati and Oldfield, Alison and Metatla, Oussama},
title = {Understanding Neurodiverse Social Play Between Autistic and Non-Autistic Children},
year = {2024},
isbn = {9798400703300},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642809},
doi = {10.1145/3613904.3642809},
abstract = {Social play supports children to develop essential life skills and foster friendships. However, autistic and non-autistic children often do not have equal opportunities to engage in social play. Previous research to improve these opportunities tends to invoke social skill interventions solely for autistic children or is focused on designing for only one group, rather than considering the interactions or needs of all children in neurodiverse groups1. In order to understand the different experiences of children during social play, we conducted interviews with 6 professionals who support neurodiverse social play and undertook observation sessions of 36 autistic and non-autistic children during unstructured social play. Our findings move beyond the existing characterizations of autistic social play and build upon the double empathy problem to capture and consider the needs of all children in neurodiverse playgroups. We argue these findings could be used to inform future neurodiverse social play technology design in HCI.},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems},
articleno = {525},
numpages = {16},
keywords = {Autism, Double Empathy Problem, Neurodiverse Play, Social Play},
location = {Honolulu, HI, USA},
series = {CHI '24}
}