In the pursuit of efficient habilitation, many service providers exercise a great deal of control over the lives of clients with developmental disabilities. For example, service providers often choose the client's habilitative goals, determine the daily schedule, and regulate access to preferred activities. This paper examines the advantages and disadvantages of allowing clients to exercise personal liberties, such as the right to choose and refuse daily activities. On one hand, poor choices on the part of the client could hinder habilitation. On the other hand, moral and legal issues arise when the client's right to choice is abridged. Recommendations are offered to protect both the right to habilitation and the freedom to choose.

Prompting, modeling, and differential reinforcement with client‐chosen rewards were used to teach 3 nonverbal people with severe to profound mental retardation to exit their group homes at the sound of the house fire alarm, using a multiple baseline design. All 3 participants learned to exit independently in less than 2 min in all experimenter‐initiated surprise fire drills and in the majority of staff‐initiated surprise fire drills. Each participant was also able to exit from five areas of the house from which teaching was not done.

Over the past few years, people with developmental disabilities have had an increasing number of opportunities to make choices and have control over their lives. There has also been a considerable amount of experimental research conducted on the effects of providing opportunities to make choices or to exercise control. The results of this research strongly suggest that providing opportunities for choice and control over events can affect the degree to which people participate in activities, the types of behaviors displayed during the participation, and people's perceptions about the situation. This article reviews this experimental research, discusses traditional views and current perspectives regarding choice and control for people with developmental disabilities, and presents ways of increasing the amount of choice and control available to people with developmental disabilities.

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