Using Contingency Contracting to Modify the Problematic Behaviors of Foster Home Residents

Abstract

This article reports the results of an investigation designed to assess the effectiveness of teaching foster "parents" how to use contingency contracting to reduce the frequency of problematic behaviors and to increase the adaptive functioning of former psychiatric patients in foster home settings. Volunteer college students, who had been trained as behavioral counselors, taught the foster parents how to formulate, maintain, and revise contingency contracts, and the foster parents recorded pre- and postexperimental frequencies of the selected target behaviors. Experimental results indicate that contingency contracting (CC) subjects made significantly greater improvement, both in their scores on a behavioral observation questionnaire and in terms of changes in actual behavioral frequencies, than did untreated control (UC) subjects. Implications of this study for structuring posthospital environments and for further research studies are discussed.