Group Skills Training to Increase the Conversational Repertoire of Retarded Adolescents

Abstract

Ten retarded adolescents in a short-term residential center lacked appropriate social itneraction skills and were referred for group conversational skills training. Group treatment consisted of an instruction-modeling-rehearsal procedure sequentially targeting three classes of converstaional skills:(1) eliciting information from others;(2) appropriate self-disclosing of interests and personal information; and (3) using reinforcing-complimentary conversational behaviors. During baseline and following each training group, social behavior was assessed by recording unstructured 8-minute dyadic conversations between randomly-paired subjects. Weekly generalization probes consisted of unstructured 8-minute conversations between each subject and a different nonretarded, unfamiliar partner. Results indicated that contingent upon group targeting of a specific conversational skill, the frequency of that skill increased in both (1) the unstructured dyadic interactions between pairs of retarded subjects, and (2)the generalization interactions between retarded subjects and novel nonretarded persons. Follow-up mainenance of skill increases was obtained. The utility of a "single group" multiple baseline design in applied social skills research is discussed.