Stacking the Deck: Teaching Social Skills to Retarded Adults With a Modified Table Game

Abstract

This study developed and evaluated a social skills training program for institutionalized mildly or moderately retarded and dually diagnosed individuals. Social skills were conceptualized as requiring an action or reaction within six skill areas: compliments, social interactions, politeness, criticism, social confrontation, and questions/answers. The program taught social skills using a commercially available table game, Sorry, and a specially designed card deck. Each card represented one of the skill areas and was designed to train either an actor or reactor response. The program featured response specific feedback, self-monitoring, individualized reinforcers, and individualized performance criterion levels. A multiple baseline across two groups (N = 3 per group) revealed that the game contingencies increased social skills in all targeted areas. After training, the subjects displayed their newly learned skills at or above their trained levels in two different settings with novel persons present. Although untargeted, the complexity of the subjects' responses increased across conditions, since there was a steady increase in the number of words they used per response. The program appears to be a viable means of training social skills since it uses standardized training procedures, requires only one facilitator, and is in itself a social situation that may encourage interactions with peers, cooperation, competition, and politeness.

Interventions

“…Self-control programs have employed a number of applied behavioranalytic strategies, including token reinforcement (Amish, Gesten, Smith, Clark, & Stark, 1988;Clark & McKenzie, 1989); modeling; feedback; social reinforcement (Foxx, McMorrow, & Schloss, 1983); prompting; and stimulus control (Schloss &Wood, 1990). In all of these studies, applied behaviordytic procedures were used to teach or motivate individuals to monitor, evaluate, andlor reinforce their own behavior.…”

Social Skills Training: The Current Status of the Field

“…In fact, all that was necessary was that the trainer give feedback and be able to understand what constituted acorrect response, i.e., be able to use the scoring criteria. We next turned our attention to teaching social/ sexual skills (Foxx, McMorrow, Storey, & Rogers, 1984). We were not interested in sexual behaviour perse since the trainees already knew how to engage in such activity.…”

“…To evaluate the game, we conducted a fonnal study (Foxx, McMorrow, & Schloss, 1983) with two groups ofplayers (three trainees per group) and a trainer or facilitator who would train both groups.…”

Teaching a problem‐solving strategy to closed head‐injured adults

“…Accordingly, the program focused on teaching problem solving through the use of validated and well-specified procedures. The training format was patterned after a program that taught social skills to high functioning mentally retarded individuals Foxx, McMorrow, & Schloss, 1983) …”