Evaluation of a Safety Awareness Group Program for Adults With Intellectual Disability.
An eight-session Safety Class lifts protective skills for adults with ID in community settings.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Researchers ran an eight-session Safety Class at Independent Living Centers. Adults with intellectual disability joined the group. Half got the class right away. Half stayed on the wait-list.
Each lesson taught abuse-prevention skills like saying no, moving away, and telling a trusted adult. The team checked safety knowledge before and after.
What they found
The Safety Class group scored higher on safety protective factors than the wait-list group. Adults remembered the steps weeks later.
The study showed group teaching can work for safety skills, not just one-to-one lessons.
How this fits with other research
Matson et al. (2013) also used small community groups for adults with ID. They boosted activity engagement through Active Mentoring. Sievers et al. (2020) now shows the same group format works for safety skills.
Grosch et al. (1981) taught leisure skills with ABA task analysis decades ago. The new study keeps the task-analysis spirit but moves it to a social-vulnerability topic.
Fesko et al. (2012) urged wider service menus for aging adults with ID. Adding a short Safety Class answers that call without big cost.
Why it matters
You can run this eight-session program in any day-hab or community room. One staff member can lead it. Adults learn to protect themselves from abuse while staying with peers. Try it next month and track their safety responses.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →Add a 10-minute safety-role-play to your next group and note who uses the stop-and-tell steps.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Using a participatory research approach, we enlisted 12 U.S. Centers for Independent Living (CILs) to recruit and enroll 170 adults with intellectual disability (ID) to be randomized to either The Safety Class, an abuse prevention group program, or usual care. Participants were asked to complete pre, post, and 3-month follow-up questionnaires. CIL staff members facilitated the eight-session, interactive program. Quantitative and qualitative findings suggest that participation in a brief safety program may improve safety protective factors among men and women with ID. The Safety Class serves as one model for delivering an abuse prevention and education intervention to adults with significant safety needs but extremely limited access to relevant community resources.
American journal on intellectual and developmental disabilities, 2020 · doi:10.1352/1944-7558-125.4.304