Using a Table Game to Teach Social Skills to Adolescent Psychiatric Inpatients: Do the Skills Generalize?

ABSTRACT

Foxx and McMorrow's “Slacking the Deck” game was used to teach verbal interactive skills to three adolescent psychiatric inpatients. Subjects were trained on three targeted skills using the game in a unit activity room and those same skills were unobtrusively assessed at other times and places on the unit by various hospital staff. Game training produced large and consistent gains in all target responses in the activity room; however, no generalization was recorded in covert assessments taken by staff members at other times of the day and in other living areas of the unit. To improve performance in daily interactions, an in-situ training procedure consisting of intermittent verbal prompts and reinforcement was programmed into the subjects' daily encounters with the staff. This procedure significantly increased use of skills in all three subjects, with most of these gains maintaining in the two subjects who were available for the 3-month follow-up.