Social skills interventions with developmentally disordered children: Comparison of peer-mediated and adult-mediated approaches.

The two main types of social skills interventions with developmentally disordered children, adult-mediated and peer-mediated, were compared to determine which was more effective in producing generalization and social validity. Additionally, the effect of involvement in treatment on peer-helper social status was investigated. The current investigation demonstrated increases over baseline in the training setting for all treatment conditions, including adult-mediated, peer-mediated, combined adult- and peer-mediated, and generalization programming conditions. Subject initiations were found to be highest during the adult-mediated intervention, however no differences between treatment conditions were found for total subject social behavior. Despite attempts to program generalization through multiple peers, response-dependent fading, and training in the generalization setting, little generalization or maintenance occurred. Not surprisingly, most measures of social validity did not indicate improvement. A measure of overall social competence did show significant pre-post improvements, however this increase cannot be decisively attributed to the interventions in this study. The results of this study indicate that future investigations should be devoted to identifying strategies which would improve chances of generalization, maintenance, and social validity