ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how children and adolescents with disabilities understand and cope with loneliness and reviews interventions for loneliness that have been applied for school-aged students with disabilities. It talks about the comprehensive review of the research literature to identify peer-reviewed journal articles describing intervention studies that addressed loneliness in school-aged students. The literature review revealed that the loneliness interventions used with students with disabilities were found to adopt one or more of four approaches: social skills training (SST), social support, therapeutic interventions, and parent-assisted interventions. The chapter investigates the impact of group implemented SST programs that were taught in face to face sessions or through computer-assisted systems, using individually tailored interventions that focused on the specific skills that the target student needed assistance with. SST is used to assist children with disabilities learn skills they need to interact effectively with their peers. Parent-assisted interventions can adopt elements of both SST and social support approaches.
