Evaluating the functional utility of congregate day treatment activities for adults with severe disabilities

Many adults with severe disabilities spend considerable amounts of time in segregated day programs. We evaluated the degree to which these programs support purposeful and age-appropriate activity. Observations in 100 congregate community and institutional program sites indicated that approximately half of consumer time was spent in purposeful activity, 75% of which was age-appropriate. In 20% of the sites, though, most activity was age-inappropriate. These results, which were similar across community and institutional settings, are discussed in terms of respective program administrators evaluating their supports through comparisons with activity involvement in other programs and the need for changes in programs providing primarily age-inappropriate activities.