Abstract
First of all, we would like to thank Arielle Silverman for her very pertinent commentary, which opens the opportunity for a debate with very important practical and theoretical implications of the article Teaching Social Skills to Children and Adolescents with Visual Impairments: A Systematic Review (Caron et al., 2023). We appreciate her call to consider both the validity of the evidence on the social skills interventions we have put forward and their practical impact. The sharing of her personal experiences including the social skills training she received and the hardships she encountered in social situations whilst growing up as a child with blindness are not only moving, but make us authors and the readers of the Journal of Visual Impairment & Blindness realize that we can train social skills as much as we want, but if we do not take into account societal barriers that are obviously out there, we might be wasting our time. On the other hand, we might have to realize as well that changing society is difficult and showing the available evidence is just a matter of showcasing the “state of the art,” including its flaws.
Dr. Silverman’s comments relate to the many existing biopsychosocial theories in which our work is embedded, and in which disability is seen as the interaction of several factors, both personal and contextual. The International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (World Health Organization, 2001) or the critical realist paradigm adopted by Shakespeare and Watson (2016) to understand disability, are some examples.
Firstly, we wanted to identify the types of intervention that provide the best evidence of effectiveness, in order to inform practitioners, with the aim of being able to replicate interventions in the field. In addition, this work also aimed to provide researchers and practitioners with an overview of study types (design), intervention characteristics and tools to be used to assess progress. In this sense, the goal of our article was to provide a synthesis of the different types of intervention, it was not to present a critical review of the perspectives adopted by the authors who have implemented and evaluated the different types of intervention.
The analysis of the 32 articles made it possible to identify a diversity of interventions and target behaviors. The results showed that several lessons or interventions have taught social skills from an environmental perspective, by including peers relation training (i.e., peer mediated, mentoring program). The notion of “socially appropriate behavior” was defined by the authors who wrote the articles in order to identify possible outcomes and various means of evaluating the effects of the programs (i.e. observation, rating scale).
In this review, we have chosen not to comment on the behaviors targeted by the lessons. However, we should have had a better discussion of the perspective adopted by the authors who chose the “expected or appropriate behaviors” for the children targeted by the interventions, and who rarely themselves discussed their results from the perspective of the children.
In addition, another weakness that should have been mentioned is that the authors generally do not indicate if they asked the students themselves what skills they would like to train or whether the behaviors or skills taught were meaningful and useful to them. It is, therefore, possible that these lessons seemed useful according to the teachers, but not at all according to the young people themselves or their parents. Future research should take greater account of these crucial aspects, and a qualitative evaluation of interventions from the point of view of the students with VI could better document the social validity of interventions.
In general, we consider that there many roles to share in improving the social skills of children with VI, and in intervening on the contextual factors so that these social skills can be put into practice. We, as authors of the review and researchers in the field of low vision, have a role to play in showcasing what is out there and in developing better strategies if these are not available, as well as in collaborating with all professionals, the children with VI themselves and their parents, but also with association representing people with VI and policy-makers. We share the view of Dr. Silverman on the importance of engaging experts and researchers who are blind or have low vision to conduct research in this field.
Yours sincerely, on behalf of all the authors,