Page 92 - Social networks of people with mild intellectual disabilities: characteristics and interventions

Chapter 4
saw their acquaintances as main initiators of the contact. A possible explanation is that for many of them, the inability to initiate contact is at the heart of their autistic disorder (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). Indeed, they often wished they had better social skills.
In contrast, people with ID knew their acquaintances for a shorter duration, but saw them more often, compared to both the ASD and the REF group and they wished to improve these contacts. They felt less affection from and connection with family members and wished to have more frequent contact with them. Moreover, people with ID had the feeling that they were the main initiators of their contacts with their network members. The combination of their wish to have more frequent contact and a small network with which they already had high frequency contact might be an explanation of their perception that these network members less often took initiative.
4.4.2 Limitations of the study
Some limitations restrict the interpretation of our findings. First, the inclusion criteria (e.g. young adults, living independently in the community) may limit generalization of the findings to younger or older people or people with more severe ID or ASD symptoms or to people living in group homes or with their parents. For instance, research shows that high-functioning adults with ASD are living with their parents in more than 50% of cases (Renty & Roeyers, 2006), so it is possible that the participants in our sample had better social skills than other high-functioning adults with ASD. The variation of the sample sources between the groups in this study was another potential limitation. The finding that the ID group has more professionals in their networks is possibly due to the fact that the ID participants were recruited via care organizations, from which they still received mobile support, while the ASD participants were recruited from a support agency giving support or advice.
Next, data were collected using self-report measures. Although it is possible that people with ID or ASD see themselves as more or less socially involved than others would report (Kasari et al., 2011), the use of proxies also has disadvantages. According to Verdugo et al. (2005), proxies should only be used when absolutely necessary, due to significant communication limitations which was not the case in this study. We tried to increase the reliability of self- reports of people with ID or ASD by adapting the measures, by simplifying the questions and by using visualization. Although we tried to ensure that the
90