Job-related social skills training ith female prisoners.
Brief BST plus self-check cards can teach and keep job social skills in adult prisoners without ongoing staff prompts.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Five women in a state prison volunteered for job social-skills lessons. The trainer used office lessons plus real-time coaching on the prison work floor.
Each woman picked three work behaviors she needed most, like asking for help or accepting feedback. The team used a multiple-baseline design to track change.
What they found
All five women quickly hit the mastery level for their chosen skills. The skills stayed strong weeks later with only light check-ins.
Coworkers and supervisors noticed the change and gave higher social-validity scores after training.
How this fits with other research
Hodos et al. (1976) did the same rehearsal-plus-feedback drill with psychiatric adults twelve years earlier. Both studies show BST works across very different adult settings.
Tallant et al. (1989) moved the same idea into community jobs for teens with intellectual disability. Their twist added problem-solving scripts; N et al. kept it simpler with self-evaluation sheets.
Reid et al. (1987) paired BST with self-monitoring for disabled youth and then faded all extras except the self-cards. N et al. copied that fade-out step, proving the combo also cuts staff time in a prison shop.
Why it matters
If you run vocational or prevocational programs, you can copy this low-cost package: brief office practice, a pocket self-rating card, and on-the-spot feedback. It needs only one staff member and no extra tokens, yet the gains held without continuous coaching. Try it next time a client needs workplace conversation skills.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
Two studies evaluated whether a degree of rehabilitation is possible with prisoners and whether development of job-related social behaviors can be part of such rehabilitation. Both studies involved women prisoners, rarely tested subjects, addressing behaviors important in gaining and retaining employment, which play a critical role in recidivism. One study involved single-subject experiments with two carefully selected, volunteer women 21 and 22 years old in a federal prison. Four on-the-job behaviors were modified by a combination of office-based training and in vivo prompting, self-evaluation, and feedback: discourtesies, attention-seeking, inappropriate flirting, and inappropriate socializing. Each was modified in the appropriate prison work environment, achieving levels rated as comparable to peers. Effects proved durable over several weeks, with some indication of generalization and of the functional validity of performance. The second study, a multiple baseline across subjects and settings, involved three selected women prisoners 22, 22, and 23 years old. Classroom behaviors-off task, talking out, and disrupting-were targeted, due to their relevance to employability, with the same treatment used in the first study. Targeted behaviors changed and remained changed over several weeks of direct observation. The generality and functional validity of changes were substantiated by teacher ratings. Effective rehabilitation of prisoners may be possible if volunteer prisoners are selected, intervention is individualized, and effects are continuously monitored.
Behavior modification, 1988 · doi:10.1177/01454455880121001