Social Skills Training of Behavior Disordered Adolescents with Self-Monitoring to Promote Generalization to a Vocational Setting

Abstract

Four emotionally disturbed adolescents in a short-term residential treatment center participated in a vocationally oriented social skill training program. Didactic instruction, provided in a classroom by a special education teacher, resulted in rapid acquisition of appropriate responses to a supervisor's instructions. However, there was no concomitant change in most students' interpersonal behavior with their work supervisor in the generalization setting. A subsequent intervention, in which students were subjected to role-play training and taught to use a self-monitoring procedure, produced generalized increases in the targeted social skill. In addition to the improvement in the students' responses to instructions, desirable collateral changes also were noted in their responses to critical feedback and to the conversational initiatives of the work supervisor. The use of a multiple baseline research design across pairs of students suggested that the generalized effects were a function of the intervention procedures. The separate effects of the role-play training and the self-monitoring procedures were not isolated in this study. However, it was proposed that the didactic and role-play training might have been responsible for the initial acquisition of the new interpersonal behavior, while the self-monitoring procedure seemed to be implicated in its generalization and maintenance.