Question

Chad, a 22-year-old man with mild intellectual disability, has good verbal abilities and can eas- ily carry on a conversation and understand com- plex directions. Chad works in a factory. He does his job well, but he has been caught steal- ing from the other workers’ lockers. The prob- lem occurs at break or other times when he is near the lockers and no one else is around. At these times, he opens people’s lockers and takes cans of soda from them, or he takes change that he uses to buy a can of soda from the vending machine. He is going to lose his job if he does not stop stealing. When caught stealing, he says he is sorry and promises not to do it again, but the problem continues. Describe how you would conduct self-instructional training with Chad to help him stop stealing from other workers.

Describe other behavior modification procedures you would use in conjunction with self- instructions to help Chad stop stealing money and soda from other workers’ lockers.

Answer 1

Chad is 22 year old man with mild intellectual disability, but he has good verbal skills which can be utilised by us for therapy. It's good for us that he is able to follow complex commands thus treatments like self instructional training or applied behaviour analysis therapy can be applied in his case.

In self instructional training we can aim at making the client aware of his stealing as a problematic behaviour first and sceondly to give chad control over his behaviour through guided self talk that gradually becomes covert and self generated and chad himself start instructing him from stop stealing. Here due to lack of adequate cognitive capacity chad may be finding difficulty in finding stealing behaviour as bad which may have bad consequences and also to recognise this as a problem. Once chad recognises this problem he can be slowly guided to solve that problem.

Other therapy technique that can be used is functional behavioural analysis and explaining the same in the form of antecedent,behaviour and consequences in simple terms to chad. I would first briefly describe stealing and tell him what makes it a bad behaviour at all. Also will try and state the consequences of this bad behaviour that it may create problems for him, person whose soda he is stealing may get upset and feel bad, people will not trust him in future and many such other consequences. Will make him realise that he can instead do good things for those people ,help them which in turn can gain him their trust and he can ask a soda as reward. All this may help chad from stopping stealing.