Identification of co-worker involvement in supported employment: a review and analysis.
Give co-workers five simple jobs—check, count, practice, prompt, maintain—and the employee keeps the skill after you leave.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Saunders et al. (1988) read every paper they could find on supported employment. They pulled out every mention of co-workers helping adults with disabilities. The team sorted these mentions into five clear jobs a co-worker can do on the shop floor.
The review did not run new experiments. It simply mapped who was doing what with co-workers in the late eighties.
What they found
Five roles emerged. Co-workers can: check that the new worker did the step right, count how often the worker talks to others, run quick practice trials, give friendly cues, and keep the skill alive after the job coach leaves.
No numbers were reported. The gift is the plain list you can hand to an employer today.
How this fits with other research
Carrier (2007) extends these roles by showing they only work when both sides adjust. The employee learns the social rule while the co-worker learns how to prompt. This two-way dance is called coadaptation.
Gaylord-Ross et al. (1995) tested one role in two adults with deaf-blindness. They taught the co-workers to prompt short greetings. Social bids rose only after the worker first got individual social-skills lessons. The 1988 list is therefore step two, not step one.
Garcia et al. (1999) supplies the reason you need the list: fifty-eight out of every hundred supported workers have social problems on the job. The roles from 1988 are a direct answer to that number.
Why it matters
You no longer need to be the only trainer in the building. Hand the five roles to a trusted co-worker, show them how to prompt or tally, and you free yourself to serve other clients. Start with role one: ask the co-worker to give a thumbs-up when the task is done right. That single peer cue often cuts your onsite hours in half.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
This article identifies the roles that co-workers have assumed in providing support to employees with handicaps. These roles included validating instructional strategies, collecting subjective evaluations, implementing training procedures, collecting social comparison information, and maintaining behavior in the context of actual employment. This review is based upon an existing research literature that has focused upon providing "support" to individuals with handicaps after they become employed. The purpose of this article is to draw attention to important new roles that co-workers are assuming. Specifically, this review is one of the first attempts at defining co-worker involvement.
Research in developmental disabilities, 1988 · doi:10.1016/0891-4222(88)90003-0