SOCIAL: Adaptation and Validation of the In-person PEERS® Program for Adolescents With Autism.

Brief summary (registry, in English)

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) falls under the category of high complexity disorders which, in most cases, accompany individuals throughout their entire life with significant impacts and costs for individuals, their families, and society at large. Adolescence is a time of increasing challenge for teenagers with ASD and their families, as it is a time to lay the foundations for the transition to adulthood but at the same time, it is a period of clear mismatch between the abilities and interests of teenagers with ASD and the expectations of their peers. It becomes increasingly difficult to initiate and maintain friendships that require social skills, communicate through social media, or make appropriate use of humor. It is in peer relationships that recognizing and applying implicit social norms is more difficult, and social errors can lead to a bad reputation, exclusion, and being bullied. This creates the need for concrete responses through evidence-based treatment programs adapted to the Italian context. In this scenario, the Program for the Education and Enrichment of Relational Skills (PEERS®) fits in, a psychosocial intervention that falls under the category of Social Skill Training (SST) conducted in a group context, evidence-based, originating from the United States for adolescents with ASD that involves structured teaching of knowledge and skills related to social relationships. SOCIAL has three main objectives: clinical, scientific, and social. The clinical objective is articulated in the study of the effectiveness of the in-person PEERS® program on an Italian population of adolescents with ASD (aged between 10 and 14) to respond to the evident need for a psychosocial intervention adapted to the Italian context. The scientific objective aims to identify an electroencephalographic biomarker that acts as a predictor of the efficacy of PEERS® and is specific to a particular individual profile. Finally, the social objective intends to extend the support network of adolescents with ASD through meetings with schools to train Teachers, thus parallelizing the treatment for generalization of the skills acquired during clinical treatment and also to the school context where peers play a key role. SOCIAL aims to respond to a gap that exists in Italy for a critical age group involving teenagers with ASD, proposing an evidence-based treatment that extends to family and school contexts.

What you commit to

• Study type: Interventional
• Planned participants: 36
• From 1 Jan 2026 to the primary completion date, 30 Jan 2027
• 1 site in 1 country
• Visits and tests: ask the trial team, the registry does not list them

Built from the registry fields of ClinicalTrials.gov. It describes the study, not your situation.

Who cannot take part

Copied verbatim from ClinicalTrials.gov and grouped by topic. Only the trial team decides who can take part.

Who the study is looking for

Age in the registry: 10 years to 14 years · Sex: All · Does not accept healthy volunteers

Full criteria on ClinicalTrials.gov

Sites (1)

Sites in registry order. Pick your city on the disease page to sort them by distance.

Related publications

• In-person UCLA-PEERS® program for adolescents with autism spectrum disorder in Italy: study protocol for a pilot and feasibility randomized controlled trial with pragmatic features and exploratory EEG markers of treatment response.Front Psychiatry · 2026 · PMID 42973677