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Abstract

Educators and recreators emphasize the importance of a constructive leisure time repertoire for successful adjustment of severely handicapped persons to integrated community environments. The present study employed social validation procedures to evaluate the extent to which professional staff and nonhandicapped individuals who might affect the community adjustment of handicapped persons perceive and value the changes in leisure time behavior that occurred as a function of successful leisure skill acquisition by severely handicapped adolescents. Samples of leisure activity behavior during free time (nontraining) sessions were videotaped before and after training for four severely handicapped teenagers; identical videotape samples were collected for three severely handicapped comparison students who did not receive training between tapings. Institutional day program staff (n = 37), community program staff (n = 35), parents (n = 47), and nonhandicapped peers (n = 47) rated the experimental students' posttest behavior samples higher than the pretest condition on all dimensions of the social validity measure. A similar increase in ratings was not obtained for the comparison students. Results indicate the feasibility of using social validation procedures to provide further information regarding the applied significance of intervention programs.

Keywords

severely handicapped youth leisure activities training social validation leisure activity preferences age-appropriateness

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Social Validation of Leisure Activities Training with Severely Handicapped Youth

Abstract

Keywords

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References