In-home generalization of social interactions in families of adolescents with behavior problems.
Clinic BST is not enough—add a single home-based family conference to turn trained social skills into daily family habits.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team ran a three-phase program with families who had teens with behavior problems.
Phase 1 taught parents and teens new social skills in a clinic using BST.
Phase 2 added a coached family conference right in their living room.
They tracked if the skills moved from clinic talk to real home talk.
What they found
Clinic-only BST created smooth conversations inside the clinic walls.
Skills fell apart at home until the home conference phase was added.
Once families held the structured meeting at home, they kept using the skills every day.
How this fits with other research
Kleinert et al. (2007) showed BST parent training lets parents run DTT with new child targets without extra coaching.
That result seems to clash with A et al.—until you see L taught one skill set parents could stretch to similar tasks.
Rutherford et al. (2003) also found clinic-only social skills groups for kids with autism barely moved to home or school.
Together the papers say: BST in clinic is only step one; you still need a real-world booster to lock in generalization.
Why it matters
If you run parent or teen social-skills groups, plan for a short in-home follow-up from the start.
One 60-minute coached family meeting can bridge the gap between "they can do it" and "they actually do it at home.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
The effects of a three-phase family communication program were evaluated. In the skill-teaching phase, family members were taught reciprocal social communication skills in a clinic setting. During the skill-review phase, each family member practiced the skills in their homes with the teacher. During the home-based family conference phase, each family was taught to use a structured format to resolve current family issues using their newly acquired skills. In-home parent-youth interactions were observed during a series of 1-hr sessions that involved directed and nondirected situations. Evaluation included a multiple baseline design across skills during the skill-teaching phase and a multiple baseline design across families for the family conference phase. Although the procedures of the skill-teaching phase resulted in parent-adolescent dyads learning to use the skills in the teaching setting, competent use of the skills in the home was not observed until the family conference phase was implemented. These results suggest the importance of home-based intervention if changes are to be obtained at home.
Journal of applied behavior analysis, 1991 · doi:10.1901/jaba.1991.24-733