Meta-Analysis of Dance Intervention Effects on Social Skills in Autism

A 2025 meta-analysis of 14 randomized controlled trials involving 312 participants, published as a supplementary PDF file. The study quantitatively assesses the effects of dance activities on social skills and related behaviors in children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorder. The analysis was conducted by researcher Yi Jingyao and includes effect size calculations, subgroup analysis, and publication bias testing.

Use Cases

• Evaluating the efficacy of dance-based interventions for improving social skills in autism based on the reported standardized mean differences.
• Conducting sensitivity or subgroup analyses on intervention outcomes based on participant age as suggested in the results.
• Assessing publication bias and heterogeneity in behavioral intervention studies based on the described meta-analytic methods.

Strengths

• Includes data from 14 randomized controlled trials, a common standard for intervention studies.
• Reports specific effect sizes (SMD) with 95% confidence intervals for five distinct behavioral domains: social skills, communication, interaction, repetitive behaviors, and perceptual abilities.
• Uses established quality assessment (Cochrane tool) and analysis software (RevMan, Stata).

Limitations

• The dataset is a 109.0 KB PDF summary document; the underlying raw study data is not provided.
• The description notes high heterogeneity among the included studies and insufficient sample sizes, which may limit generalizability.
• Column-level documentation for any underlying data is absent; field semantics must be inferred from the published analysis.

Provenance

Source

figshare, author Yi Jingyao.

Collection Method

Systematic review and meta-analysis of literature from eight Chinese and English databases up to March 20, 2025.

Time Range

Literature search covered studies up to March 20, 2025.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-05-19 05:38:34.