Telephone conversational skills training with socially isolated, impaired nursing home residents.
We evaluated the effectiveness of a comprehensive training program for enhancing the conversational skills of socially isolated, impaired elderly nursing home residents. A multiple baseline design across behaviors was used to train four subjects (aged 87, 85, 68, and 66), on four content-related conversational components: expressing common courtesies, making positive self-disclosures, asking questions, and making interjections and acknowledgements. Training procedures included instructions, modeling, behavior rehearsal, feedback, and reinforcement. Results showed positive effects with all four subjects; in two cases, changes were significant enough to affect untrained observers' perceptions of the elders' conversational skills.
D000368:Aged; D001521:Behavior Therapy / Q000379:methods*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007100:Imitative Behavior; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D008297:Male; D009735:Nursing Homes; D012381:Role Playing; D012934:Social Isolation; D013689:Telephone