Affiliations: California State University, Sacramento, Sacramento, California | San Francisco State University, San Francisco, California | Valley Mountain Regional Center, Stockton, California | Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee
Note: [] This research was supported by a grant from the Office of Special Education Programs, Secondary Transition Branch, U.S. Department of Education. We thank Janis Chadsey-Rusch and Charles Salzberg for consultation and Janet Collier, David Krapht, Norma Ramos, Shap Siegal, Christina Tissot, Michelle Waxman, and Jane Wise for their assistance.
Note: [] Address reprint requests to Hyun-Sook Park, Department of Special Education, California State University, Sacramento, 6000 J Street, Sacramento, California 95819-6079.
Note: [] This article is dedicated to Robert Gaylord-Ross, a great scholar, an advocate for persons with disabilities, and our dear friend, who passed away since the initial version of this article was written.
Abstract: The present study investigated two approaches to promoting the social interaction of five employees with mild disabilities with their nondisabled coworkers. The first approach, a coworker advocacy program, assisted coworker advocates to design and implement social activities with disabled employees; the second approach, a social skills training, taught targeted appropriate social behaviors to the disabled employees. An ABACA design was emplayed for the first three participants while a reversal order of interventions, ACABA, was used for the two other participants. Multiple measures were used: generalization probes on social interaction, social validation data, a social support questionnaire, and a quality of work life scale. The results show that the coworker advocacy program was not enough by itself to induce social interaction between disabled and nondisabled workers. Delivering social skills training to disabled workers was essential and was more powerful than the coworker advocacy program. In addition, the participants scored higher on perceived social support and quality of work life after the social skills training. The majority of coworkers and supervisors perceived the participants to be more socially interactive with their coworkers after the social skills training.
