Teaching mentally handicapped adults how to use a cafeteria

This study taught three moderately to severely mentally handicapped women skills to enable them to make use of cafeterias. While some work has been carried out in this area (e.g. Marholin et al., 1979; Van den Pol et al., 1981; Desai, 1983), it has not established whether hospital-based individuals with this level of handicap and no previous experience of cafeterias can be taught how to use them. A role-playing procedure was used during training with in vivo assessments being carried out before and after training. An in vivo generalization assessment was also conducted. Training was found to be successful with the skills taught transferring to the real life situation and subjects' improved performance, in the majority of the skill areas, generalizing to a 'new' cafeteria which had a completely different system of use.