Research: Social Stories for Children with Disabilities

This article reviews the research from 1995 to 2006 on the effectiveness of using social stories to improve the behavior of children with autism and other disabilities.

The authors use a very strict definition of behavior improvement in order to compare the effectiveness of social stories across 16 research studies. For example, if a social story was written to help a child learn to not slam doors, and the child closed a door quietly even once before the social story was read to the child, the social story is considered to be ineffective, because the behavior was present before the introduction of the story. However, even given this strict definition, the authors conclude that social stories can be effective in improving behavior. They also note that the rules about the number of sentences of each type used in a social story (directive, descriptive, etc.) do not improve the outcome of social stories, and in fact may make social stories less effective.