Achievement Place: development of the elected manager system.
Let the group elect their peer manager—democratic selection plus token control produces better chore completion and higher satisfaction than appointment by bid or adult assignment.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team tested three ways to pick a peer manager in a group home.
Kids elected a manager, bid tokens for the job, or staff picked the leader.
They used an alternating-treatments design so each method ran for set days.
Chore completion and youth satisfaction were tracked every session.
What they found
Democratic election won.
Chores got done faster and kids said they liked it best.
The elected-manager token system beat both bidding and adult assignment.
How this fits with other research
Pliskoff et al. (1972) worked in the same home one year earlier.
They only watched what kids bought with tokens; Macdonald et al. (1973) shows how to let kids run the system.
Meuret et al. (2001) later moved the token idea to an adult psychiatric ward.
They found some patients drop out, so youth elections may need extra support for tough cases.
Silva et al. (2020) also used alternating treatments in a classroom.
Both studies prove group contingencies work, but kids prefer having a say in the rules.
Why it matters
You can add voting day to your token economy.
Let clients nominate and elect their peer manager for the week.
One ballot takes five minutes and may boost cooperation without extra tokens or staff time.
Try it in group homes, classrooms, or day programs where peers already know each other.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
A series of experiments was carried out to compare several administrative systems at Achievement Place, a family style behavior modification program for pre-delinquent boys. One aspect of the motivation system at Achievement Place was the token economy in which the youths could earn or lose points that could be exchanged for privileges. Several arrangements for assigning routine tasks and for providing token consequences for task performance were compared for their effectiveness in accomplishing the tasks and for their preference by the boys. The independent variables studied included: (1) individually assigned tasks versus group assigned tasks; (2) consequences for individual performance versus consequences for group performance; (3) a peer managership that could be earned by the highest bidder versus a peer managership that could be determined democratically by the peers. The results suggested that among those systems studied the system that best met the criteria of effectiveness and preference involved a democratically elected peer manager who had the authority both to give and to take away points for his peers' performances.
Journal of applied behavior analysis, 1973 · doi:10.1901/jaba.1973.6-541