Comparing Two Interventions Employed to Improve an Appropriate Conversation-Initiating Skill in Adults with Intellectual Disabilities

Abstract

Individuals with intellectual disabilities (ID) often have deficits in social communication skills, such as initiating a conversation with others appropriately. These deficits tend to have negative impacts on their wellbeing and quality of life, including social participation and employment. Numerous behavioural interventions have been employed to remediate social communication deficits in people with ID, such as behavioural skills training (BST) and remote audio coaching (RAC). The current research aimed to use BST and RAC remotely via Zoom to teach an appropriate conversation-initiating skill to four adult participants with ID who worked in a café. A non-concurrent multiple baseline across participants design was used to evaluate the effects of BST and RAC on participants’ conversation-initiating behaviour. Participants were allocated to either the BST or RAC intervention group using randomisation, or based on their preferences, to compare these two interventions to determine which led to better outcomes. Results indicate that RAC led to substantial improvements in appropriate conversation initiations in one of the two participants in the RAC intervention group and the improvements were maintained for 4 weeks upon the removal of RAC. In contrast, BST led to some improvements in appropriate conversation initiations in one of the two participants in the BST intervention group. The improvements became more significant after introducing an additional procedure, error correction (providing corrective feedback following incorrect responses), than those resulting from BST alone. Neither RAC nor BST resulted in skill generalisation across individuals in the natural vocational setting (the café). Potential limitations involved in this research and relevant implications are specified and directions for future research are discussed.