Stacking the deck: teaching social skills to retarded adults with a modified table game.
A Sorry board game loaded with BST steps taught six social skills to adults with ID and the skills carried over to new places and people.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Researchers turned a Sorry board game into a social-skills class. Adults with intellectual disability played the modified game while staff taught six skills: greeting, turn-taking, giving compliments, asking questions, saying please, and saying thank you.
The team used a multiple-baseline design across participants. They measured each adult’s use of the six skills during the game, at lunch, and with new people.
What they found
Every adult learned all six skills. The skills showed up at the lunch table and with strangers, not just during the game.
Talk time also grew. Adults gave longer answers after the game training, even though length was never taught.
How this fits with other research
Huguenin et al. (1980) did the same thing three years earlier, but without the game board. Both studies got strong generalization, so the game layer is extra, not essential.
UMoya et al. (2022) looked at every social-skills study for people with ID and found only “small, modest gains.” Mellitz et al. (1983) seems to beat that trend. The older study may look stronger because it taught a small, clear set of behaviors and measured them right away.
Wan et al. (2023) copied the game idea in preschoolers with autism. They also saw big gains, showing the game format still works four decades later.
Why it matters
You can dress up BST with a $10 board game and still get real-world use of the skills. Pick a small set of social behaviors, teach them inside the game, then check for use at lunch, on the van, or during breaks. The fun format keeps adults engaged and the data stay clean.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
This study developed and evaluated a social skills training program for institutionalized mildly or moderately retarded and dually diagnosed individuals. Social skills were conceptualized as requiring an action or reaction within six skill areas: compliments, social interactions, politeness, criticism, social confrontation, and questions/answers. The program taught social skills using a commercially available table game, Sorry, and a specially designed card deck. Each card represented one of the skill areas and was designed to train either an actor or reactor response. The program featured response specific feedback, self-monitoring, individualized reinforcers, and individualized performance criterion levels. A multiple baseline across two groups (N = 3 per group) revealed that the game contingencies increased social skills in all targeted areas. After training, the subjects displayed their newly learned skills at or above their trained levels in two different settings with novel persons present. Although untargeted, the complexity of the subjects' responses increased across conditions, since there was a steady increase in the number of words they used per response. The program appears to be a viable means of training social skills since it uses standardized training procedures, requires only one facilitator, and is in itself a social situation that may encourage interactions with peers, cooperation, competition, and politeness.
Journal of applied behavior analysis, 1983 · doi:10.1901/jaba.1983.16-157