Understanding ASD individuals' difficulties with managing money

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a neurological disorder that impacts behavior, communication and social skills of affected individuals. The difficulty of youth with ASD to know how to properly approach other people leads to increasing isolation and stronger dependence on their parents, who often experience insufficient support especially after their children finish high school, when discontinuity of public assistive services is often experienced. In spite of being one of the most difficult developmental periods in their life, inadequate assistance is provided to learn practical, daily living skills, such as the key ability to manage money. In this paper, we report a study carried out with six teenagers with High-Functioning Autism, aiming to identify the difficulties they find in using money in real scenarios. In particular, the teenagers involved in the study exploited both a vending machine Web application for learning money-related skills and directly interacted with a real vending machine. Their interactions were analyzed to understand their behavior addressing situations involving purchases. The study employed a mixed method analysis approach incorporating subjective facilitator observations, objective task completion measures and eye tracking metrics to analyze their money management skills. The results reveal the difficulties that such individuals have to face in order to manage the concept of money in practice.