This study aimed at understanding the phenomena of progresses in social interaction among adolescents with mild autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Most researches on adolescents with mild ASD adopted the idea of progress that indicated a view of deficiency and took competence as the focus of intervention. While some of them claimed to have positive results in helping the mild ASD subjects gain progress (i.e., being more capable in social interaction), there are no promising changes appearing in long term observation and most of the adolescents with mild ASD have limited capacity in social interaction throughout their lives. To understand this contradiction concerning the phenomena of progress, this study carefully reviewed the definitions of progress employed in these literatures and found that, the progress conceptualized in most of existing studies can be described as a "competence-focused" one which is obtained from measuring the subjects' capacity in comparison with their own level of social interaction performance before the research manipulation, or in comparison with the normal children participating in the research. Thus, the obtained progress exists only within a narrow condition and could not be replicated outside the research settings. Putting aside the view of deficiency, this study adopted the paradigm of discovery and intended to grasp the phenomena of social interaction of the adolescents with mild ASD as a whole in order to clarify the possible dimensions of its progress. Three mothers of adolescents with mild ASD were interviewed for their long-term observation of their children's social interaction. Using a phenomenological method, interview transcriptions were analyzed and resulted in a description of the general structure of social interaction of adolescents with mild ASD. The general structure revealed from the analysis is composed with five themes. (1) Embodied rule-sticking behaviors, which indicates the rules the subjects with mild ASD stick with have the character of being ontological and never fall into the level of negotiation. (2) Lacking of feedback loops  in communicative interaction, which shows that the subjects with mild ASD are not able to comprehend the communicative cues other than overt language and thus no modification would occur even as they offend others. (3) Conversation on specific interests and habits raising the quality of interaction, which highlights the phenomena that the subjects and their conversation partners will ignore the communicative hindrance and advance their interaction while focus on the topic of interest. (4) Other-depending pragmatic impact in communication, which indicate that the pragmatic impact along with the ASD style of communication can be enlarged or eliminated by the conversation partners as they adopt different attitudes. And (5) complying behavior when no conflict with others, which denotes that as the interaction partners deliberately avoid conflict with the subjects with mild ASD, the latter could comply the others' request. According to these findings, even though the characters of ASD style of communication are still salient and prevailing, "progresses" in interaction can also be obtained due to the topics of interest, the others' attitude toward the pragmatic impact from the talk of the subjects and deliberate avoidance to conflict by the others. It is clear that the progress can be observed not due to the improvement of competence but the others' responses. This understanding solves the contradiction concerning the phenomena of progress

appearing in the existing literatures. In addition to answering the research questions, our findings also provide a conceptual reflection to the studies on adolescents with mild ASD and a guidance for practitioners to design proper plans for training the adolescents. Last but not least, stemming from this research is also an advocacy to the public: The interaction with people with mild ASD is a process for mutual understanding rather than proving their being deficient.

Keywords
Mild autism spectrum disorder, phenomenology, pragmatics, qualitative research, social interaction

Download