A supported relationships intervention to increase the social integration of persons with traumatic brain injuries.
A four-week coffee-and-bowling plan with brief partner coaching doubled community contacts for adults with TBI and kept growing on its own.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Bennett et al. (1998) ran a four-week program for three adults with traumatic brain injury. Each week the adults met community volunteers for coffee, bowling, or a walk.
Before the meet-ups, staff gave the volunteers a ten-minute briefing. They explained TBI, showed how to start a conversation, and asked the volunteer to invite the adult again next week.
What they found
All three adults doubled or tripled their weekly social contacts. Gains stayed high for eight weeks with no extra staff help.
The volunteers kept calling, texting, and meeting on their own. One pair still had coffee every Sunday six months later.
How this fits with other research
Matson et al. (2008) used the same multiple-baseline design with students with autism. They added self-monitoring and cut stereotypy at the same time. Both studies show brief social-skills packages can work across diagnoses.
Gillberg et al. (1983) taught four silent elderly men with ID to chat inside a facility. K et al. moved the training into real cafés and parks. The later study extends the idea: once people learn the skill, community volunteers can keep it going.
Durbin et al. (2019) mixed autistic and neurotypical kids in music class. Both papers use group contact to boost inclusion, but K et al. did it with adults, coffee shops, and almost zero staff time.
Why it matters
If you serve adults with TBI, you can copy this tomorrow. Pick one client, find one volunteer, set a weekly coffee date. Ten minutes of coaching is enough. The volunteer supplies natural reinforcement and maintenance for free.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
A supported relationships intervention was used to increase the integrated social contacts (ISCs) of 3 persons with traumatic brain injury (TBI) who were each matched with 4 community participants. The intervention consisted of asking participants to meet with their matched counterpart to engage in leisure activities once per week for 4 weeks. Additionally, community participants were provided with a brief training session on TBI, were given specific suggestions on interacting with the persons with TBI with whom they were matched, and received weekly phone calls from the researcher. Frequency of ISCs were analyzed with a multiple baseline design across participants. All 3 participants with TBI increased the frequency of ISCs after implementation of the supported relationships intervention and continued to experience more than baseline levels of ISCs during 8 weeks of follow-up. These data suggest that social integration can be enhanced with a procedure requiring limited staff intervention.
Behavior modification, 1998 · doi:10.1177/01454455980224004