Page 77 - Social networks of people with mild intellectual disabilities: characteristics and interventions

Comparison of Social Networks
report having at least one friendship (Eaves & Ho, 2008; Howlin, Goode, Hutton, & Rutter, 2004) and the same percentage report spending time with others in consequence of their hobby, or attend a club or church regularly (Eaves & Ho, 2008). Although highfunctioning adults with ASD do have friendships, their relationships are less close, less empathic, less supportive and less important to the individual, compared to people without ASD (Baron-Cohen & Wheelwright, 2003). However, perceived informal social support is related to quality of life (Renty & Roeyers, 2006) as well as marital adaptation (Renty & Roeyers, 2007) in adults with ASD. To our knowledge, a more comprehensive examination of structural (e.g. size and composition, frequency of contact, initiation of contact, length of the relationship) and functional (e.g. perceived emotional and practical support) characteristics of the social network of adults with ASD from their own perspective is lacking.
In the field of ID more research is conducted regarding social networks 4 than in the field of ASD. With respect to the structural characteristics of social
networks of people with ID, research mainly focuses on the number of network
members. In their systematic review Verdonschot et al. (2009) concluded
that the social networks of people with ID are often small, but the size in the research literature varies from a median of six network members (Robertson et al., 2001) to an average of 11.67 (Lippold & Burns 2009), 14.21 (van Asselt- Goverts, Embregts, & Hendriks, 2013) and 22 (Forrester-Jones et al., 2006) for people with ID living in the community. Differences between studies in the size of the social networks of people with ID might be attributable to the use of different measures: the MSNA (Baars, 1994; van Asselt-Goverts et al., 2013), the Social Network Map (Robertson et al., 2001; Tracy & Abell, 1994), the Social Network Guide (Forrester-Jones et al., 2006), or the Social Support Self Report (Lippold & Burns, 2009). Moreover, the observed variation in the size of the social networks reported between studies could be contributed by the design of the study with respect to the informants: the people with ID themselves (van Asselt-Goverts et al., 2013; Forrester-Jones et al., 2006; Lippold & Burns, 2009) versus proxy informants, such as support staff (Robertson et al., 2001). With respect to the functional characteristics, research indicates that social support is perceived mainly from professionals (Forrester-Jones et al., 2006) and that professionals are highly appreciated by individuals with mild ID; for affection comparable with family and acquaintances and for practical/ informational support, they are valued even higher (van Asselt-Goverts et al.,
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